Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism 9780804793469

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H A SI DISM I NC A R NAT E

encountering traditions

Stanley Hauerwas, Peter Ochs, Randi Rashkover, and Maria Dakake editors Nicholas Adams, Rumee Ahmed, and Jonathan Tran series board

H A SI DISM I NC A R NAT E Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism

SHAU L M AG I D

STA N FOR D U N I V ER SIT Y PR E SS STA N FOR D, CA LIFOR N I A

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Magid, Shaul, 1958- author. Hasidism incarnate : Hasidism, Christianity, and the construction of modern Judaism / Shaul Magid. pages cm.--(Encountering traditions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-9130-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Hasidism--Doctrines. 2. Incarnation. 3. Mysticism--Judaism--History. 4. Judaism--Relations--Christianity. 5. Judaism--History--Modern period, 1750I. Title. bm198.2.m34 2014 296.8'332--dc23 2014035430 isbn 978-0-8047-9346-9 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion

To Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in memoriam ‫ שומר נפשות‬,‫חוקר תורני‬ Excavator of Torah, Pastor of Souls

The most accurate theology is the most dangerous. Franz Rosenzweig, “Yehuda Ha-Levi” Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself. Patti Smith, Just Kids There is no reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity; Judaism is the anti-Christian principle pure and simple. Leo Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz The same is the same only in being affected by the other, only by becoming the other of the same. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Abbreviations











Introduction: Incarnation and Incarnational Thinking

xiii

1

1 Divinization and Incarnational Thinking in Hasidism: An Overview

15

2 Charisma Speaking: Uniqueness, Incarnation, and Sacred Language (Lashon ha-Kodesh) in Nahman of Bratslav’s Self-Fashioning

31

3 Jewish Ethics Through a Hasidic Lens: Incarnation, the Law, and the Universal

51

4 Malkhut as Kenosis: Malkhut and the Zaddik in Ya’akov Koppel Lifshitz of Mezritch’s Sha’arei Gan Eden

81

5 “Brother Where Art Thou?” Reflections on Jesus in Martin Buber and the Hasidic Master Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev

113

6 Liberal Judaism, Christianity, and the Specter of Hasidism

xi

Postscript

137 171

Notes

179

Bibliography

233

Index

263

AC K NOW L E D GM E N T S

This book has taken numerous turns over the past few years and many people have been instrumental through its various “incarnations.” I am certain I will not recall all of those who had a hand in helping the project take its present form and I apologize in advance for those I fail to mention. The editors of the series at Stanford University Press, in particular Randi Rashkover and Peter Ochs, saw this book for what it was and I am eternally grateful for their feedback, suggestions, and dedication. Their editorial skills and vision are exemplary, as is their friendship. I would also like to thank Emily-Jane Cohen, senior acquisitions editor at Stanford University Press, for her patience, support, and encouragement throughout the long process of taking a manuscript and making it a book. She was involved in the process far more than an acquisitions editor usually is and I greatly appreciate her time and effort. Mariana Raykov and Friederike Sundaram, both at Stanford University Press, were very helpful in the final stages of production, including helping secure publishing rights for the use of the Chagall painting on the cover. Thanks to Charles Trumbull for his copyediting and Hila Ratzabi for her always expert attention to detail. Others who have been conversation partners, readers, and critics throughout include Nathaniel Berman, Zachary Braiterman, Menachem Butler, Aryeh Cohen, Constance Furey, Jonathan Garb, Pinhas Giller, Sarah Imhoff, Martin Kavka, Zoe Klein, Nancy Levene, Michael Morgan, Allan Nadler, Eden Pearlstein, Seth Schwartz, Joseph (Yossi) Turner, and Steve Weitzman. Thanks to Basya Schechter for her music and for pushing me to think about the implications of this project in the contemporary world. Thanks to all my friends at the Fire Island Synagogue. ­Although gone for many years, I could have never written this book without the inspired teaching of my teacher Dovid Din. His ghost gently hovers over this book. I was invited to speak about various chapters in the past few years. I want to thank Matthias Lehmann of UC/Irvine, Jeremy Dauber of Columbia University, Michael Meyer of HUC-Cincinnati,

xii   A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

and Sam Berrin Shonkoff of The University of Chicago for their invitations and hospitality. I also want to thank Rachel Elior for responding to a presentation of the first chapter at The University of Chicago. I have learned much from the recent work of Daniel Boyarin and Peter Schäfer on Judaism and Christinaity in late antiquity. Their work has helped shape this project. Elliot Wolfson has been more than supportive throughout; he is a part of the book itself. His work on the question of incarnation and embodiment in Jewish mysticism has been invaluable to my thinking and his friendship remains steadfast. In my view, the philosophical and theological implications of these questions cannot be adequately excavated without a close and deep reading of his work. Part of this book is a critical engagement with the work of Moshe Idel, with whom I have had the privilege to talk about these matters over the years. We may not agree on some topics included in this book but I remain a close reader of his work and continue to learn much from him. David Brakke and Winni Sullivan, chairs of the Department of Religious Studies at IU, have been encouraging and helpful during my time at IU as have Steve Weitzman, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Mark Roseman, directors of the Borns Jewish Studies Program. This book comes into the world as our daughter Kinneret reaches bat mitzvah. I hope she finds something in it that is of use to her as she finds her place in our complex world. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my teacher and rebbe Zalman Schachter-Shalomi who left this world just as the book was going into the final stages of production. I am honored that this may be the first book dedicated to his memory. I spoke with him about the project numerous times and he was always curious and encouraging. His legacy, his audacity, and his mischievous smile remain an inspiration for those of us who view our scholarship as an integral part of our larger lives. May he continue to inspire impassioned and engaged scholarship, and may his memory be a blessing.

A BBR EV I AT IONS

I Cor.

First Corinthians

I Sam.

First Samuel

II Sam.

Second Samuel

b.T.

Babylonian Talmud

Deut. Deuteronomy Eccles. Ecclesiastes Eph. Ephesians Exod. Exodus Ezek. Ezekiel Gen. Genesis Isa. Isaiah Jer. Jeremiah Josh. Joshua Lev. Leviticus Num. Numbers Ob. Obadiah Phil. Philippians Prov. Proverbs Ps. Psalms R. Rabbi Rom. Romans Song of Sol.

Song of Solomon

Zech. Zechariah

H A SI DISM I NC A R NAT E



INTRODUCTION Incarnation and Incarnational Thinking Christianization is divinization, and divinization is humanization. Michael Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God God was made man, that man might be made God. Saint Augustine, Sermon XIII de Tempore If words stand at the heart of our enterprise, then it is with the question of words and their comparisons that we must begin. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine

I One salient dimension of contemporary scholarship on Jewish mysticism is its departure from the apologetic tendencies of traditionalism—that is, its defense of the self-referential claims in the texts themselves—to engage with concepts common in the textual traditions of other great religions and cultures.1 Important attempts are being made to integrate Jewish mysticism more fully into the humanities and to promote it as a significant contribution to the history of human literary and spiritual creativity. I am not speaking here of comparative analysis in a formal sense.2 Rather, the richness of a textual tradition can become visible when refracted through a prism of ideas from a competing tradition without apparent historical influence or confluence.3 Scrutinizing inherited distinctions, for example those between Judaism and Christianity, is a fruitful way of revisiting Jewish mystical texts that have characteristics challenging to traditional received interpretations.4 In this book I argue that the best way to examine difference is through sameness, and sameness is best articulated through shared nomenclature.5 I call my approach to Hasidism reading through “incarnational” lenses. I begin with four basic theses. First: Throughout the history of Hebraic monotheism, the lines separating the divine from the human—or more generally the divine from the world— were tenuous and fragile. Ancient Israelite literature often tested and sometimes crossed these boundaries, until Christianity emerged as a strong reading of these Israelite tendencies, erasing those boundaries as the very apex of

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Christology.6 Perhaps partially in response to what they viewed as the deviant nature of Christianity’s theological innovation, the rabbinic sages of late antiquity, those who constructed what we now call Judaism, shut the doors to incarnational thinking. Or did they?7 It is true that the Israelite texts that hinted at incarnational motifs were largely excluded from the Hebrew canon. Incarnation became a focal point of medieval Jewish polemics against Christianity.8 But the lines separating the human from the divine remained thin, perhaps because the divine/human dichotomy was embedded in the very fabric of Hebraic monotheism. It was not until Moses Maimonides’ use of rationalism and the doctrine of radical transcendence, founded on his version of negative theology, and his suggestion that the categorical distinction between the human and the divine is the very cornerstone of Hebraic monotheism, that the ambiguity between the divine/human distinction became inoperative.9 There are two caveats, however. First, as much as Maimonides had attained canonical status by the time Kabbalah emerged in medieval Spain, his theological and hermeneutical presuppositions were not accepted by many kabbalists, even though he was co-opted (via creative reading) as a supporter of kabbalistic ideas.10 Second, while today Maimonidean rationalism is held up as the necessary antidote for the return of “mythical” Judaism, it is really a Maimonideanism passed through modern filters—for example, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen— and less a depiction of twelfth-century rationalism. Perhaps if Maimonidean rationalism is taken in its medieval context, some medieval kabbalistic readings of him are more coherent than might be expected. Second: After the emergence of Christianity, Jewish notions of incarnational thinking (sometimes depicted as divine embodiment) took on a particular form some scholars have called logos theology. Divine embodiment was now limited to the Book, the word of God, not the human body.11 It is a matter of scholarly debate whether, in fact, logos theology predated Christology, providing a rationale for incarnation, or was a response against Christology, enabling the rabbis to posit post-prophetic divine immanence without acceding to incarnation.12 In any case, this theological discussion provides one way to understand early Christianity and classical Judaism and the continuing tension between the divine and the human.13 The link between Jewish and Christian notions of traversing the divine/ human divide (embodiment/incarnation) is Torah. Judaism has long accepted the notion that God is embodied in the Torah, though questions remain as to what that actually means.14 Daniel Boyarin treats this logos theology as dis-

I N T R O D U C T I O N    3

tinct from incarnational theology.15 He claims Judaism can accept the former but not the latter without risking distinctiveness. Michael Fishbane expresses a similar sentiment when he notes that the mystical esotericists (perhaps prekabbalistic) “descend even further [than the rabbis] into the hidden mysteries of Scripture to the point where the essence of the Bible and deus relevatus were One. Hereby the sacrality of the biblical text actually merged with the sacrality of the Godhead.”16 Third: By the Middle Ages the specter of divine incarnation in the human body again came into play. (Actually, it may have been in play throughout, but normative rabbinic doctrine largely effaced its public influence.) Perhaps after Judaism and Christianity parted ways, when Judaism was no longer being destabilized by internal critique, the divine/human tension once again became a factor in Jewish theology.17 Medieval Kabbalah proved that the dyke of logos theology constructed by the rabbis against incarnational theology did not hold.18 By the Middle Ages, Christology was a stable theological doctrine, and no one who desired to remain a Jew would openly profess allegiance to it. There was a distinction, however, between the fundamental principle, probably rooted in ancient Israelite religion, and the Christian articulation upon which it rested. The boundaries between the divine and the human, God and the world, were permeable holdovers from paganism. They created the conditions for the evolution of Christology and at the same time enabled Israelites/Jews to develop monotheistic ideas that did not totally exclude God from their corporeal existence. (The kabbalistic concept of the shekhina is one example of this.)19 So while medieval kabbalists polemicized against Christianity as much as against their philosophical counterparts, their arguments were different. For many of them Christology was simply untenable philosophically, not only in its articulation but also on theological grounds. The kabbalists rejected ­Christology but fought against it, often covertly, as an error of articulation rather than principle. In fact, as the work of Elliot Wolfson, Yehuda Liebes, and their students has shown, kabbalists often polemicized against incarnational theology by adapting some of the very conditions that gave birth to their subject of critique.20 Whether it advocates unio mystica (mystical union) or not, Kabbalah was founded against a metaphysical template whereby the veil separating the divine from the human is translucent if not sometimes transparent. Fourth: Much of medieval Kabbalah was presented in metaphysical, cosmological, or mythical language that did not directly relate to corporeal existence. There were important exceptions, such as Abraham Abulafia, the person and

4   I N T R O D U C T I O N

the work, but the ways in which the boundaries between the human and the divine were traversed in medieval Kabbalah were not directly threatening to ironclad distinctions between Judaism and Christianity. With Hasidism this began to change. The steps from Christian ideas of the Incarnation to rabbinic logos theology, to post-rabbinic Jewish incarnationalism, to medieval kabbalistic metaphysics could be distinguished in Hasidism when the zaddik, or righteous master, as axis mundi, supplanted the fetishization of the Book, which had become the centerpiece of classical Rabbinic Judaism. If Martin Buber was correct that one of Hasidism’s innovations was the recentralization of the person in place of the word, a notion apparent also in early Christianity, the reformulation of incarnational thinking in Hasidism was not far-fetched. While the nexus between incarnationalism and medieval Kabbalah was more complicated than we think, I argue in this book that it was in Hasidism that the transition from logos theology to incarnational theology reached its most radical, materialist articulation. Moshe Idel agreed that in Hasidism a new apex of these ideas was reached, even as he argued against using the term “incarnation,” part of his commitment to avoid the terminological quandary that is central to the scholarly enterprise.21

II Hasidism, like its medieval kabbalistic predecessors, arose in a world where Christianity and all it represented was forbidden. Most Hasidic masters knew little about Christianity other than what they had absorbed from Jewish polemical literature, for example, Toldot Yeshu and philosophical treatises such as Joseph Albo’s Sefer ha-Ikkarim and the work of Isaac Abravanel, or ideas they absorbed from living among Christians.22 Most were probably not aware of the extent to which canonical texts such as the Zohar were polemicizing against Christianity, an idea that comes to light only in modern scholarship. (Most traditionalists date the Zohar to a period before the formal advent of Christianity.) In contrast, the Hasidic masters were by and large not engaged in polemics against Christianity; that is, although they lived in a Christian world, they were largely not working under a Christian gaze. At the same time, Jews influenced by the Enlightenment who were forging what would become various forms of liberal Judaism constructed their new theologies very much under the Christian gaze.23 As a result, and because many of these Jewish ideas resembled Protestantism (many Jewish reformers were very well-versed in Christian Scripture and tradition), Judaism in this period was constituted in ways that would dif-

I N T R O D U C T I O N    5

ferentiate it from its Christian neighbors (this also may have been done to dissuade potential converts to Christianity). Concepts such as incarnation were deemed antithetical to Judaism. To a degree, Judaism became what Christianity was not. By the same token, some Jewish thinkers argued that what the truly rational Christian theologians viewed as embodied in liberal Protestantism was in fact better represented by the new liberal Judaism. Precisely because Hasidism developed in modernity while drawing from medieval kabbalistic texts that adapted Christian motifs in order to polemicize against Christianity (likely unbeknown to Hasidic writers), Hasidism grew largely outside the Christian gaze and had no need to draw the distinctions common in modern Western European Jewish thinking. It was the freedom to think outside the Christian gaze, using earlier kabbalistic sources minus their earlier polemical agenda, that produced a Jewish theology colored by incarnational thinking.24 Hasidism’s affinity with Christianity did not go unnoticed, either by Jews or Christians. Joseph Wolff ’s missionary journal, written in 1823–1824, contains the following: It would be very advisable for the missionary students at Stansted Park to read the Hebrew manuscript (No. 3) containing the principles of Israel Baal Shem Tov, the Jewish sectarian. There is, in that sectarian’s principles, much tendency to Christianity. Rabbi Mendel was struck with amazement, when he found me acquainted with the principles of Israel Baal Shem, for this sect is very numerous in Poland, who receive so readily the New Testament, must be of the sect called Hasidism.25

While this one journal entry is not ample proof of a widespread recognition of Hasidism’s affinities with Christianity, it does offer a window into the ways in which Christians viewed Hasidic spirituality from a distance.

x One of the more difficult aspects of our study of Hasidic ideas is the use of nomenclature—“incarnation,” “incarnational thinking,” and so on—what Moshe Idel calls “terminological quandaries.”26 Although I began work on incarnational tropes in Hasidism before the publication in 2007 of Idel’s Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism, Idel’s book presents many new challenges, particularly dealing with Idel’s argument against using such incarnational terminology to describe ideas in the Hasidic texts.27 While he acknowledges structural,

6   I N T R O D U C T I O N

­ erhaps even phenomenological, symmetry between what he calls “sonship” in p Jewish mysticism and incarnation in Christianity and is open to the possibility of influence or confluence,28 he opposes the importation of terminology from one tradition to describe another. On the affinities between mystical Judaism and Christianity, he writes, It seems, therefore, that similar views describing an emanation that does not sever the ontic affinity between emanator and emanated, and that posits a possible return of the latter within the former, were found in some ancient Jewish sources. Such a concept seems also to underlie the somewhat later ­theosophical-theurgical understandings of the theological sin in cutting the branches, kizuz bi-netiyot attributed in rabbinic literature either to Elisha ben Abbuya or to Adam.”29

Idel avoids the term “incarnation,” obviously laden with considerable theological weight, when trying to describe the many-faceted articulations of sonship in Jewish mysticism. For him, “Incarnation, in the way Christian theologians use the term, is a matter related to a small span of time, when the divine preexisting Son assumed flesh, in order to suffer as part of his kenosis, after which he then returns to his exalted status, leaving the flesh behind him.”30 He then adds the important eschatological component that this figure is “the redeemer par excellence.” Acknowledging mystical Judaism’s sometimes surprising affinity with Christological motifs, Idel adds that it is evident that kabbalists “avoided, premeditatedly in my opinion, resorting to explicit incarnational terminology, not only because they were afraid to use it from a political-religious point of view, but also because their reasonably loose positions did not require such expressions, and they resorted to non-carnal terms which expressed their ideas about embodiment and dwelling of the divine.”31 Adding that there is no adequate Hebrew cognate for “incarnation” Idel concludes, I prefer to resort to the term “embodiment” as the result of the divine dwelling within human beings, rather than to the more specific and theologically loaded term “incarnation,” with the exception of one instance related to Sabbatai Zevi. Since the term is not only terminologically problematic in the Jewish contexts to be discussed below, in which the term “flesh” is premeditatedly avoided. . . . I consider its use in the following discussions as irrelevant, especially because in the instances to be discussed below, neither the precise conceptual nor the terminological aspects covered in the sense that incarnation I used are present.32

I N T R O D U C T I O N    7

While “embodiment” is a term often used as a substitute for “incarnation” to distinguish Jewish from Christian texts, it may also obscure the similarities between them, conditions for negotiating difference. Idel chooses to invent neologisms to describe mystical phenomena whereby he can avoid using a term from one tradition to describe a similar phenomenon in another. This solves one problem while creating another. His invented terminology may distinguish kabbalistic from Christian phenomena, but it does so by blurring generic similitude, thereby reducing the possibility of recognizing specific differences. Idel is explicit that part of academic discourse involves paying attention “not only to similarities, but even more so to differences between religious phenomena, which is characteristic of a scholarly interest in specificity.” It is worth asking if the neologism is an adequate means of negotiating similitude and difference? Things are often best compared (yielding both similarity and difference, or similarity in difference) within a genus as opposed to things that are categorically other. By describing Jewish articulations of incarnational thinking as something other than “incarnation,” by using a different term, the specificity of comparison may be weakened. What Idel misses is a point argued by Jonathan Z. Smith: “It is axiomatic that comparison is never a matter of identity. Comparison requires the acceptance of difference, and a methodological manipulation of that difference to achieve some stated cognitive end.”33 This approach is developed at length by Elliot Wolfson in numerous studies on Kabbalah. For example, in Language, Eros, Being he argues that a nuanced understanding of Kabbalah’s use of embodiment and incarnation requires looking beyond history and into the phenomenological structures of the kabbalists when they speak of embodiment and offer interpretations of biblical anthropomorphism.34 Therefore, following Wolfson and Smith, if we use the term “incarnational” with full knowledge that we mean something different from the Christian formalization of that term, specific comparisons and expressions of difference may be better served. As Smith puts it, “A comparison is a disciplined exaggeration in the service of knowledge. It lifts out and strongly marks certain features within difference as being of possible intellectual significance, expressed in the rhetoric of their being ‘like’ in some stipulated fashion.”35 One must question why scholars dedicated to the specificity of both phenomena and terminology cede “incarnation” to Christianity simply because it plays a more central role in Christian theology. The term represents a phenomenon, Idel’s “ontic affinity”— whatever the term may have been in Hebrew or Greek to describe it—that

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clearly had precedent in Israelite religion even as Christianity offered its own particular take on it. Of course, incarnation does not mean just one thing in Christianity but rather embodies many meanings and interpretations, sectarian differences, and significant nuances that were hotly debated even before the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. It is easier to arbitrate difference when one begins with similitude. Idel’s new terminology undermines the latter in order to negotiate the former, but in the end it may subvert the very enterprise he wants to foster. Wolfson has contributed an influential thought on this question: I am well aware that the incarnational tropes to be extracted from Jewish texts are distinct and in opposition to the Christian formulations; indeed in my estimation, it is the disparity that justifies the use of the same nomenclature. This is not to deny the adverse portrayal of Christians by Jews and Jews by Christians. However, the rejection of the “other” does not mean the other has no impact on the formation of one’s own sense of self; on the contrary, condemnation of the other bespeaks contiguity with the other, and this is so even when the other has preached intolerance or perpetrated violence in the sociopolitical arena. By utilizing the term “incarnation” in explicating kabbalistic texts I do not mean to paint a monolithic picture. Precisely by deploying one term to ponder disparate phenomena I call attention to the rift that both unifies and splits the two.36

Use of “incarnation” thus does not narrow our inquiry but widens it; it enables us to think inside an “ontic affinity” while acknowledging clear differences and the threshold where similitude ends and difference begins, or when differences are expressed within the ontic affinity shared by the two textual traditions. In his 1990 book Drudgery Divine Smith writes that “comparison provides the means by which we re-vision phenomena in our text in order to solve our theoretical problems.”37 Scholarly inquiry into difference is something that was largely uninteresting for the Hasidic masters. Their main concerns were devotional, and they used creative readings of the tradition to cultivate devotional behavior.38 Medieval polemicists had a much more politically charged agenda; they were invested in categorical difference between Judaism and Christianity for sociopolitical ends, though they likely believed fervently in the veracity of those categorical theological distinctions. Texts such as the Zohar are more complicated in these matters. On the one hand the Zohar often contested Christological ideas in a veiled manner but did so inside the ontic affinity that its authors shared with those very ideas.39

I N T R O D U C T I O N    9

And one can see how those Christological resonances emerged through Sabbatean readings of the zoharic corpus. By the time Hasidism emerged, the ontic affinity presented in the Zohar was part of Jewish intellectual canon, at least in communities untouched by the Enlightenment. So Hasidism, a movement that did not take a polemical stance against Christianity and developed largely outside the Christian gaze, proved an interesting place to revisit these affinities and differences as they took another form, in Jewish literature. Because of Hasid­ism’s utilization of the zoharic corpus one can find such polemics embedded in Hasidic discourse, but the Hasidic writers were likely not aware of the Zohar’s polemical stance Thus, like Wolfson, we use the terms “incarnation” and “incarnational” (to be distinguished from “Incarnation,” the centerpiece of Christianity) with full knowledge that the Hasidic texts would reject the Christological implications even as their ideas often come quite close to Christologcial ideas. Wolfson’s comment in Venturing Beyond is pertinent: “Suffice it here to note that the task of responsible scholarship is to acknowledge the reverberations of these ideas in contemporary compositions, which undoubtedly have an influence on the current socio-political scene, even though we want to avoid ethical condemnation of a tradition shaped in a different time. In short we need to navigate between the extremes of pious apologetic and moral dogmatism.”40 The ontic affinity—again to borrow Idel’s locution—that many Hasidic texts share with Christian incarnational texts enables a fruitful discussion of both similarity and difference when they are juxtaposed rather than placed in opposition to one another. This enterprise is reminiscent of what some theorists have called “cultural translation.” When scholars describe a phenomenon in one language by importing a word from another, the stock in trade of scholars who work with texts not written in scholarly language, they produce a cultural product as much as make a linguistic choice.41 Translations are simultaneously the products of cultures coming into contact with one another and a force that produces that contact. Using the terms “incarnation” and “incarnational” to describe Hasidic texts is an acknowledgement both of similitude (“ontic affinity”) and an invitation to a deeper exploration into that similitude which, of course, includes the delineation of difference. Light is not only shed on the Hasidic text but the term used to describe it is altered. Judith Butler’s exploration of cultural translation in her Parting Ways: Judaism and the Critique of Zionism may be helpful in this context.42 She notes that

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translation and what she calls “transposability” is necessary for a “crossing of worlds.” By this she does not mean ecumenism in the sense of interreligious dialogue, but rather an attempt to find a common language in order better to understand and utilize the terms as they are embedded in their respective contexts.43 Her interest in Parting Ways is in the interface between traditional and secular notions of justice as a critique of Zionism, but her approach could just as easily be used in analyzing two religious traditions. Inventing neologisms to describe texts, ostensibly protecting them from the weight of foreign terminology, is one approach, but Butler’s is preferable: “The assumption is that religion is a form of particularism, tribalism, or communitarianism that must ‘translate’ into a common or rational language in order to have a legitimate and restricted place in public life.”44 This kind of translation does not collapse one religious phenomenon into another or, in Hans ­Gadamer’s term, “fuse” them. Rather, it suggests that translation can open a chasm not only between the two systems but also within the tradition one is trying to understand and breathe new life into the possible ways it can be understood. This requires not only a close reading of the texts but also understanding the terms of the interpreter, who must adhere to scholarly protocol as well as use hermeneutical ingenuity to read the texts, as Gershom Scholem suggests, “against their own intentions” (probably a take on Walter Benjamin’s “reading against the grain”). What stands between my method and Idel’s may not merely be a disagreement on the terminological quandary of whether “incarnation” can be used to describe Hasidic phenomena but on the role of the scholar more generally. Should we read the texts only on their own terms or should we open a chasm in the text itself such that we can view it otherwise by forcing it into dialogue with a related textual tradition? This is done all the time when methodological paradigms (e.g. Marxist, psychoanalytic, or deconstructionist) are used as templates for the reading of classical texts. Literary scholarship in any tradition is an act of translation. Description, definition, extrapolation, interpolation, and explication—all are acts of translation. Translation and transposability, using terms from one tradition to explain another, is another way to open the chasm. My use of “incarnation” and “incarnationalism” is close to the act of cultural translation as described by Butler, a way of destabilizing both the term and the texts we seek to interpret. I do not propose collapsing one into the other; quite the opposite. I am interested in exploring difference via similitude, in deepening our understanding of tradi-

I N T R O D U C T I O N    11

tions that share an ontic affinity that surfaces when Judaism no longer needs to define itself against Christianity and no longer needs to see in Christianity an unequivocal “not-me.” The social precariousness of such an enterprise should not be underestimated, but I do not want to be hamstrung by it either. Jews today are not being compelled to convert to Christianity as they were in prewar Western Europe, not to mention medieval Spain, Italy, and Germany. Today most Diaspora Jews are tolerated and accepted minorities in Christian societies. Yet the distinctions between the two communities remain an important part of Jewish identity, even as Jewish-Christian similitude is not as threatening to Judaism as it once was. Contemporary scholars are called upon to examine the past while realizing that scholars of the past were doing the same. Their world is not ours, thus their “Christianity” need not be ours. There is no imperative for us to defend as canonical their readings of Judaism and Christianity. They were expressions of their times, and we should be inspired to advance our own views. The hazards of our project are readily apparent, yet it is both important and our responsibility as scholars, whatever our investment in a particular tradition may be, to revisit old ways in the light of a new age. While this study is not historical in the formal sense, it does make a number of historical claims. Focusing on theological issues in Hasidism and Christianity through close readings of Hasidic texts, I argue that it is possible to detect the articulation of incarnational tropes that, while not totally absent in earlier kabbalistic literature, are more overt in Hasidism. The question is, why? In part it may be due to the historical context in which Hasidism arose, specifically a Jewish mysticism born in modernity but not directly subject to the Christian gaze. This is surely a historical claim, yet it is one founded on a textual analysis of literature that has never explicitly addressed the proposition. The affinities between Hasidism and Christianity highlighted in this book were noticed in nineteenth-century Europe long before they surfaced in post–World War II America. Many of the Europeans came from traditional or Hasidic backgrounds and ended up as Maskilim (proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment). The neo-Hasidic movement in late-nineteenth-century ­Europe and later the Palestine Mandate, made up of literary and artistic figures such as I. L. Peretz, Martin Buber, Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, Samuel Abba Horodetsky, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Marc Chagall among many others, used Jewish affinities with Christianity, many drawn from Hasidic life and literature, in their construction of modern Jewish literature and art.45

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Hasidism’s popularity in contemporary Jewish spirituality, perhaps a ­second-wave neo-Hasidic movement, especially in America, was partly a product of a certain refraction of American Christianity and not limited to the postwar period. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz observe, “Although historians generally agree that Hasidism had no direct impact on the shaping of Jewish modernity, it has been argued [by Gershom Scholem, Jacob Katz, and others] that Hasidism challenged, often quite effectively, traditional rabbinic institutions of authority and models of religious virtuosity. Hence, it is said that Hasidism indirectly—dialectically—prepared the way to the secularization of East European Jewish life, if by secularization is meant the weakening and eclipse of religious authority and traditions.”46 Hasidism’s influence on westernized and “enlightened” Jews in both Eastern and Western Europe can be traced at least to the mid-nineteenth century. It became more prominent in the latter decades of that century and the beginning of the next in what was called the neo-Hasidic movement.47 Its postwar instantiation merged with the postwar American religious innovation. Having emerged from its traditionalist version in early twentieth-century Europe, Hasidism proved happily compatible with the American spiritual renaissance and a religious landscape pervaded by countercultural values and a longing for spiritual values.48 The plethora of publications on Jewish meditation, astrology, the JuBu (Judaism-Buddhism) movement, and so forth attests to this claim. Notions such as human experience as the center of religiosity, the accessibility of God to human experience, the use of nature and “world­ liness” as tools of religious devotion, and the creation of a Jewish “social gospel” in tikkun olam, bring Judaism and Christianity closer together. The influence of New Age religion on American Jewish spirituality is a subject for scholarly debate.49 In the present book I posit a circuitous line of influence.50 I am not arguing that “Christianizing” tropes in Hasidism are bringing about a “Christianization” of contemporary Judaism. I am simply suggesting that the popularity of Hasidism in contemporary Judaism should attract scholars to make a closer analysis of the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual affinities among Hasidism, Judaism, contemporary Kabbalism, New Age religion, and so forth. This book is a prolegomenon to the broader historical and cultural project, drawing attention to affinities between Hasidism and Christianity through close textual analysis.51 My more speculative suggestions about the influence of Hasidism may be open to accusations of generalization, often considered the cardinal sin of

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historical research. Reflecting on French philosopher Michel Foucault’s comment that “history is for cutting,” medieval historian David Nirenberg notes, “That conviction is strong among historians of ideas, some of whom go so far as to suggest that to guard against false continuities, we should treat texts and ideas—especially the most classical and seemingly enduring—as ‘speech-acts’, their meaning to be interpreted only within the immediate context of their utterance.” And yet, he continues, “No amount of cutting can eliminate the historian’s need to generalize, that is, to create connections and continuities between nonidentical things.”52 Or, as a philosopher once said, “Generalizing is the occupational hazard of the philosopher.” This is to say that while one must work with caution and care, the philosopher, historian, or theologian can never sever their work from the world in which they live or from the image of the future they wish to create. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “Criticism and prophecy must be the two categories that meet in the salvation of the past.”53 Hasidism Incarnate dwells in the details of Hasidic textuality. I make a conscious attempt, however, to historicize that textual tradition and offer suggestions—some may call them generalizations—as to why Hasidic metaphysics developed the way it did, how it became a template for contemporary Jewish spirituality, and what its potential impact is for future interaction with Christianity, especially in America.54

III Most scholarly studies of Hasidism begin by placing it in its historical and theological contexts. An introduction to the history of Hasidism, what Scholem called the “latest phase of ” Jewish mysticism, would include a more thorough historical and social contextualization for the literature under examination.55 In Hasidism Incarnate I take a different tack. I examine a series of Hasidic texts spanning the entire history of Hasidism and develop a theory of “incarnational thinking,” showing how the texts navigate the divine/human divide and the ways in which they push and sometimes even break those boundaries in order to posit an immanent God who can be both worshipped and felt, within an orthodox Jewish framework. I then examine various themes that are addressed in innovative ways in Hasidic literature, such as charisma, kenosis, ethics, and the personhood of Jesus. Since my interest is not only a textual reading of Hasidic literature but also its impact on modern Judaism, the final chapter examines attitudes of Jewish theologians and scholars on Christianity in the twentieth century. I focus on

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four Jewish thinkers in order to map the changes in attitudes across history and geography. Germans Hans-Joachim Schoeps and Leo Baeck were active both before and after World War II, while Americans Michael Wyschogrod and ­Elliot Wolfson wrote in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

x I conclude with a series of reflections on the ways in which Hasidism has had an impact on modern Judaism, how its return to “mythos” has opened contemporary Judaism to new influences at least as interesting as the role that reason played in the post-Enlightenment period. Differences between Judaism and Christianity remain, but I hope this book will convince readers that those differences are more nuanced, subtle, and interesting than the old Hasidic masters—or any of us—might have imagined.

1

D I V I N I Z AT I O N A N D I N C A R NAT I O NA L T H I N K I N G IN HASIDISM An Overview This doctrine [incarnation] is one shameful to utter, to listen to it is sacrilegious, and God forbid that I sin with my tongue by even mentioning this doctrine with the opening of my mouth, or by saying these things brazenly in the face of heaven concerning the Creator. Yaakov ben Reuven, Milhamot ha-Shem (Wars of the Lord) That the anthropos is made in God’s image implies that God is in the image of the anthropos. . . . To attribute human form to God is to attribute divine form to humans.” Elliot Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines

My analysis of Christian tropes in Hasidic literature begins with the notion of the God/man in the Hasidic doctrine of the zaddik. Zaddikism looms large in the Hasidic movement. While the saint and holy man have had a long history in Judaism and became a central motif in the Zohar, the classical text of medieval Judaism, its place in Hasidism remains distinct if only because it has come to dominate living Hasidism.1 My aim is not to contribute further scholarly analysis of the history of the zaddik in Hasidism or its relationship to previous Jewish literature, but to consider the more specific notion of the ­zaddik as a superhuman God/man who has achieved quasi-divine or incarnational status.2 The zaddik will be used here as a topos to exhibit the ways in which ­Hasidic masters experimented with the complex notion of traversing the divine/human divide, an idea that has been a part of Judaism from antiquity and has been incorporated as a central tenet in the Christian theory of incarnation.3 As Christianity became more committed to high Christology and as Judaism defined itself more and more in opposition to Christianity, incarnational thinking faded in Judaism, with the exception of the esoteric traditions, where traces of such doctrine remained but were largely veiled in metaphysical and cosmological jargon. The Maimonidean matrix of a radically transcen-

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dent God that stripped any doctrine of incarnational possibilities became the norm in medieval Judaism. Rabbinic incarnational thinking was mostly interpreted out of existence.4 One can see this, for example, in the work of ­Steven ­Schwarzschild (1924–1989) and his student Kenneth Seeskin (b. 1947), two philosophers who promoted a radically transcendent neo-Maimonideanism, an idea articulated by the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842– 1918). “The Transcendence of the Rational, which might also be called ‘anti-­ incarnationalism,’ a­ sserts that it is impossible for the ideal to be realized in a sensuous medium. The principle is the philosophic equivalent of the basic Jewish conviction that God is separate from the world and cannot be depicted with images of things found in the world.” 5 Such thinking dominated scholarship on Jewish philosophy until Kabbalah became not only the subject of philological and historical studies but also a template for constructive philosophical and theological thought.6 ­Kabbalah often exhibited “incarnational thinking,” albeit until the rise of Hasid­ism, these incarnational ideas remained largely confined to small circles of adepts, gradually seeping into popular religion in the form of kabbalistic customs that began spreading in the seventeenth century. Incarnational thinking became more popular with the Sabbatean heresy, when the publication of kabbalistic books grew apace.7 Hasidism’s adaptation and ­popularization of the zaddik as a divine/human being played an important role in the reintroduction of incarnational thinking into normative Judaism. Hasidic zaddikim certainly did not replace Christianity’s high Christology. Rather, Hasidism introduced new ways to situate the translucent veil that separates the human and the divine. This daring experiment challenged the Maimonidean thinking that informed much post-medieval non-mystical Judaism.8 In a different vein Martin Buber makes his own analogy: “But the figure of the suffering Messiah that appears from generation to generation, and goes from martyrdom and death to martyrdom and death, has recognizable traces up until the latest popular tradition of Judaism: still in Hasidism the tale is told of this or that tsaddiq, dying a violent death, that he was Messiah, son of Joseph.”9 As I discussed in From Metaphysics to Midrash, one of the salient characteristics of the Deuteronomic reforms, concretized in but not limited to Deuteronomy, was the transition from person to text as Moses prepared to depart from the Israelite community. At Sinai and after, the law and Moses are inextricably intertwined (Deut. 5:23, 24), but as the narrative unfolded and Moses’s death neared, the law and Moses became more detached, to the point that the law replaced Moses as teacher (Deut. 30:11–14).10 Moses sympathized with

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I­ srael’s fear of losing him and, consequently, their connection to God. He suggested that the word of God could be “taken to heart” and through recitation could guide them on the right path (Deut. 6:7–9; 30:11–14). After Moses’s death the law-cum-book became the central focus of Jewish meditation on the covenant, while the charismatic person played less of a role (for example, Joshua and even Ezra never attained the centrality Moses enjoyed). Christianity reversed this trend, perhaps most directly expressed in John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” For Christians it was not only that Jesus, as God incarnate, was the central focus of covenantal life; it was that the person Jesus replaces/becomes the book or the word.11 While this may sound dissonant to contemporary Jewish ears, it must be remembered that the line separating the human and the divine was much more porous in the late first and early second century CE.12 The move from text to person, from human being (Moses) to language (Torah), dominates Deuteronomy and subsequently Rabbinic Judaism. Gershom Scholem has claimed that some of the subterranean ancient mystical traditions that survived rabbinic orthodoxy may have emerged again in Kabbalah, so the transition from person to language then back to person may have been significant in the emergence of the mystical in medieval Judaism. In short, the Deuteronomic transition from person to text was never fully manifested in the kabbalistic tradition.13 Finally, the resistance in kabbalistic teaching of the divine/human divide contributed to the emergence of zaddikism in Hasidism. In this sense, though zaddikism may have been the most innovative element in Hasidism, the underpinnings for such a turn back to person from text was already deeply embedded in the kabbalistic tradition upon which it was based.14 Before Hasidism, the holy man as the nexus of the human and divine in Kabbalah was largely expressed in cosmological language (except in the Sabbatean heresy, where Sabbatai Zevi, proclaimed as the Messiah, was given a quasi-divine status by his followers). Medieval kabbalists were well aware of their Christian counterparts and very sensitive to the commonalities between their own esoteric discourse and Christian doctrine. Many knew about Christian adaptations of kabbalistic themes that in some cases even contributed to Christian Kabbalah by teaching and making kabbalistic material available to Christian theologians.15 Hasidism’s relationship to Christianity was quite different. While Hasidim lived in the Christian world and were often quite knowledgeable about Christianity, they were freer than their medieval or early modern predecessors from the influence of Christian onlookers. This freedom provided room to explore the divine/human

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nexus in daring ways and, in doing so, show that the person-text relationship of normative Judaism was less definitive than had been believed. Hasidism thus provided both a substantive and practical reversal of the Maimonidean paradigm while often co-opting Maimonides into its camp.16 A reading of selected Hasidic literature about the novel ways Hasidic masters explored the divine/human nexus through discussion of the zaddik and how the zaddik sheds light on the reversal, though not elimination, of the ­person-text trajectory, leads to a “Jewish” notion of incarnational thinking. Sha’arei Gan Eden, the kabbalitsic work of Ya’akov Koppel Lifshitz of M ­ ezritch (d. 1740), a pietist who died just before the emergence of Hasidism, contains startling, albeit opaque, ideas. Koppel lived most of his life in Mezritch,17 and it is likely that he had contact with the pietists who later gathered around Dov Baer of Mezritch (d. 1772), disciple of the Baal Shem Tov,18 who created the first real circle of Hasidim.19 Hagiographical literature records that the Baal Shem Tov read and highly recommended Koppel’s Sha’arei Gan Eden.20 Koppel’s text offers the following reading of the verse in Psalms (90:1) calling Moses a “man of God”: “It is said about Moses that he is an ish ha-Elohim. But if he is a man (ish) then he is not God (Elohim)?! Rather, above he is called God (Elohim) and below he is called a man (ish).”21 This is so striking because, in line with much of kabbalistic interpretation, it rejects and even subverts the common euphemistic rendering of the passage, Moses is a “godly man,” instead considering Moses to be both human and divine. This idea appeared in different guises throughout early Hasidism. For example, the Hasidic master Elimelech of Lizhensk22 wrote, “When the zaddik is found on a high level in matters of Torah, of mitzvot and of contemplative worship [devekut] with God, he is called ‘son of the Makom [ben la-Makom].’ [Makom is a euphemism for God.] But when he thinks about domestic matters of this world such as commerce, despite the fact that these are also great mitzvot, he is only on the level of a servant.”23 This was not about attributing divinity to a human, but rather sonship, the notion that an individual’s status as human or something more than human depends upon his state of devotion. This line of thought was not uncommon in the early period of Hasidism.24 These brief textual examples in Koppel and Elimelech of Lizhensk serve as a good prelude because both expressed a kind of literary audacity that, while oblique and largely inscrutable, would be less likely to occur in a society dominated by Christianity, such as in the German-speaking regions of Europe in the eighteenth century. Koppel’s aside may not suggest that Moses was divine—his

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lack of an explanation makes that impossible to know—but he felt free to express himself in such a way that such an interpretation would be plausible. The nexus between the human and the divine in Hasidism was assessed in the first homily in Degel Mahane Ephraim by Moshe Hayyim Ephraim of Sudilkov (1740–1800), a grandson of the Baal Shem Tov.25 Moshe Hayyim was not a leader or member of any Hasidic school. He taught independently and did not live in close proximity to the emerging Hasidic courts in the generation after the Baal Shem Tov.26 His collected teachings reflect an early period of Hasidic spirituality infused with faith healing, shamanism, and the zaddik as magical miracle-worker.27 His collected teachings, Degel Mahane Ephraim, often exhibit the audacious spiritual style here expressed in the liquidity between the realms of the human and the divine. Moshe Hayyim presents what appears to be a standard argument for identity between God, Torah, and Israel as first articulated in the Zohar’s locution “God, Torah, and Israel are one [had hu].” This trinity then becomes an occasion for a more reflective notion of the divinity in/of the human. It is written in the Zohar, “God, Torah, and the souls of Israel are all one” [­Zohar 2.73b]. This needs to be understood. The very life of Israel [hiyut Yisrael] is, as it were, from the essence of God [me-azmut Kudshe B’rikh Hu],28 as it is written, “and He blew into his mouth the soul of life [nishmat hayyim]” (Gen. 2:7).29 And we know that a person only breaths from his essence. “And this is the Torah” [Num. 19:14] this is Adam/man. Therefore [the Torah] has 248 positive commandments and 365 negative commandments that correspond to the limbs and sinews of the human body. This is how to read the verse “And the is the ­Torah, Adam” [Num. 19:14].30 This alludes to the fact that the Torah is literally [­mamash!] the essence of Adam/Israel—God, the Torah, and Israel are one.31

The relevance of the Zohar’s identity of God, Torah, Israel to our topic is the way in which Moshe Hayyim offers a literal rendering of this opaque triadic equation by suggesting that “the breath of life” God breathes into Adam at creation is the transference of divine essence to the human and thus the first link in this triad.32 It does not mean, however, that the human is by definition divine.33 The theosis of the adept, or in Moshe Hayyim’s locution, the full disclosure of his divine essence, must be brought about through human action. Why? Because while a human being may contain the essence of God, he is also composed of corporeal matter that prevents that essence from becoming manifest.34 The Torah serves as the second link in the triad God, Torah, Israel

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that can activate the divinity dormant in the human to reach its full potential beyond the human. This is reminiscent of Montaigne’s famous quip, “Oh what a vile thing is man . . . if he does not raise himself above humanity.” Torah is presented as the template for human action and the vehicle for theosis—the unfolding of the essence of God within—since Torah also contains the essence of God.35 Moshe Hayyim claims that by living a life in accordance with Torah, by absorbing Torah through study and action and allowing it to become a part of one’s being, the innate divine essence of the human becomes manifest through interaction with the essence of divinity in the Torah that the individual absorbs.36 Moshe Hayyim illustrates this later in this homily through illness and healing. The human gets sick, he suggests, because of a lack of faith in the source of Torah (God), making him susceptible to illness and disease. A lack of faith disables the divine essence—and efficacy—of Torah and therefore the human, making him susceptible to corporeality and disease.37 The function of Torah as a healing salve is common in Degel Mahane Ephraim and early Hasidism but not directly relevant here.38 This text simply illustrates the extent to which the Zohar’s triadic equation is taken to infer a transference of divine essence to Torah and the human (Israel), potentially enabling the disciple of Torah to transcend human frailty. The first text cited presents a slightly different proposition. Divinity is embedded in the human at birth, and Torah enables that potential to become fully manifest. In this reading, even if one posits that “Adam” in the verse from Genesis refers to all humanity (for our Hasidic thinkers most likely it does not), because it is only the Jew (and only the male Jew), through Torah, who can reveal the full divinity that lies within all human beings. An integration of creation and revelation is also implied. Creation is the moment at which God, creating Adam, first transfers God’s essence to the world. But this kernel remains dormant because of human frailty and sin. Revelation introduces an additional dimension of divine essence (Torah or Logos), the purpose of which appears to be the activation of the divine essence of the Jew. The efficacy of Torah, however, is not simply its fulfillment in any external sense but the absorption, even consumption, of Torah by its practitioner; this is reminiscent of Ezekiel being commanded to eat the scroll (Ezek. 3:1–3). Hence, Moshe Hayyim writes, “If this faith in God [presumably in the notion of Torah as containing divine essence] is consistently embedded (takuah) in the heart of man, and God is his trust, he will not need any [external] medicine. Rather, divine grace [alone] or prayer will arouse the grace of God to heal him.”39 The

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activation of the divine essence of the individual will be sufficient to overcome any deficiency in human corporeality. While this falls short of a formal notion of divination, it does imply an ability to overcome the limits of corporeality and suggests that humans contain the inner resources (Torah Logos) to provide the means for their own healing. The generic idea of superhuman potential implied in Degel Mahane Ephraim is applied in specific instances in Toldot Yaakov Yosef by Jacob Joseph of Polonye (1710–1784), the first Hasidic text to appear in print (1780).40 The Toldot is a combination of Jacob Joseph’s creative homilies and teachings of his master, the Baal Shem Tov, that he recorded. It is one of the great compendia of early Hasidic teachings. The following excerpts apply a notion of superhumanity to biblical figures and the rabbinic hero Rabbi Akiva. Each instance assumes the possibility of transcending one’s humanness while remaining an active member of humanity. In fact for the Toldot the most exalted state of humanness is precisely being human while having transcended one’s corporeal limitations. “And Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years; Sarah had stopped having the periods of woman. And Sarah laughed, saying to herself, ‘Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment with my husband so old’” [Gen. 18:11, 12]. As I have written in numerous places, it is difficult to understand how this is relevant to all people at all times.41 If it is just a story, what happened, happened [and why should we care?]. It seems it can be explained in the following manner: The purpose of the human being created with matter [homer] and form [zura] is that he can purify matter such that it can be transformed into form, as it is written, “And a person should make them and live by them” [Lev. 18:5].42 This can be understood according to [Moses] Nahmanides’ idea that the status of the human can be divided into various levels. The level represented by Enoch and Elijah is one where their matter becomes so purified that they were transformed into ­angels who continue to live [forever].43 There is another level. After such a person ascends [is divinized] he can return to the world to elevate those below. This is the secret meaning of the verse “I had bathed my feet—was I to toil them again” [Song of Sol. 5:3]. . . . It is known that the form, which is the soul, is called Abraham and the body, which is matter, is called Sarah. . . . Now we can understand “And Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years.” This means that for both of them matter and form were totally purified. 44 “In those coming days [u’baim ba-yamim]” refers to the level of form and soul which is called “days” in contrast to the body or matter that is called “night,” as is known.

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“Sarah has stopped having the periods of women.” This refers to the level of matter that houses physical desire, called “women” [nashim]. Rather this level of matter was elevated to the place of the male soul that desires the spiritual. After they both reached this state [of purity] it was said to them to return and have children, that is, “the souls they made in Haran” [Gen. 12:5]. Giving birth to a son is thus impossible for such a person unless one returns from this lofty state in order to uplift those below. This is the meaning of “And Sarah laughed, saying to herself, ‘Now that I am withered. I am withered’”: my body/physicality is done. She did not believe that she could descend from the level where her form had completely nullified her physical desire and evil inclination [yezer ha-ra].45

The relation between matter and form is a repeating trope in Jacob Joseph’s rendering of the human condition. In this case he places this relation in the context of the seemingly unnatural announcement of the birth of Isaac in ­Genesis 18. The conventional reading is that Isaac’s birth was a miraculous instance of divine intervention in the natural order of human reproduction, but Jacob Joseph implies that the unconventional nature of the birth was that Isaac’s parents had already become so divinized (completely transferred their matter into form) that they no longer had the carnal desire or the requisite attachment to corporeality needed to conceive a child. In short, they understood themselves as angelic as Enoch or Elijah and as spiritually refined as Ben Azzai, the rabbinic sage who died the mystical death of the divine kiss.46 Their surprise was not about the unnaturalness of giving birth after the cessation of Sarah’s reproductive cycle but rather the awareness that in such a divinized state they could in fact return and live as corporeal beings (to elevate those who dwell in the lower—human—plane).47 Jacob Joseph’s framing of this narrative is essential. He begins by asking the question of the usefulness of this story. That is, in what way can it relate to the spiritual life and aspirations of the reader?48 In his view, if an exegete can only explain the story in context—that is, provide only a plain-sense reading—then the reader should ask “what happened, happened, and why should we care?” Hence his comment is not simply a way of understanding the biblical episode but more importantly a lesson about the possibilities of devotion “for all people at all times.” By making their matter form, thereby purifying their corporeality, individuals transcend the limits of their physicality and become divinized creatures. What Sarah learns is that one who has achieved that pure state can be asked to “return” to the realm of the corporeal for the sake of others. This does not nullify their spiritual achievement but guides that achievement toward particular ends,

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in this case giving birth to Isaac and creating the lineage of covenant and redemption. This idea is repeated often in Jacob Joseph’s description of the zaddik, who is, to borrow an incarnational locution, “in the world but not of this world.” The idea of individuals transcending their humanness and achieving a quasi-divine status is not uncommon in Hasidism. A discussion about how such “divinized” individuals could possibly fulfill commandments appears in Hayyim Czernovitz’s (1760–1818) Sidduro shel Shabbat: “One who has left the bounds of humanity cannot fulfill any mitzvah and cannot study Torah because he has already left the human condition. This is why God put it in our nature to be cut off and fall back from too much love. Only then will we be able to fulfill the Torah.”49 What is not explained here is what happens if the individual loses that divine status or perhaps that status is bracketed in order to live the covenantal life of mitzvot. The radical Hasidic teachings of Gershon Henokh of Radzin (d. 1890) offer a notion whereby an individual erases the distinction between human and divine will and continues to fulfill the commandments simply to maintain social cohesion.50 In any event, in the teachings of Jacob Joseph, the possibility of a divinized being to act in this world as human is not only relegated to the realm of (mythic) biblical figures but also (quasi-historical) rabbinic heroes. He offers a reading of the famous talmudic passage of “four who entered Pardes”51 as a framework to discuss the difference between two types of divinized beings: There is a negative commandment “not to come at any time to the Shrine behind the curtain [of the Tent of Meeting]” [Lev. 16:2]. . . . We mentioned earlier the four different levels of those that entered Pardes. Ben Azzai died in a state of rapture. Nevertheless the stature of R. Akiva was greater for he “entered in peace and returned in peace.” We need to understand why R. Akiva was greater than Ben Azzai who died with a kiss and in a state of rapture which is the telos and perfection [of human life]. . . . It appears that the status of R. Akiva was indeed greater because the telos and perfection of human life that is constituted with matter and form is to subjugate matter and make from matter, form, in all manner of life [b’frat u’klal b’frat]. That is, the person should sanctify his body such that his matter becomes form. After he has adorned and sanctified himself in his specific life he should do the same for others, the vulgar masses who represent matter juxtaposed to the elite in Israel who constitute form. In doing this he elevates the lowly ones to higher levels. This is what is meant by “Draw me after you, let us run” [Song of Sol. 1:4]. The lowly ones, who are matter, should be drawn to those pulling them to the heights, to the level of form.52

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Jacob Joseph introduces a similar motif, one that dominates this entire work, regarding the ability of the human to transcend human imperfection (matter) and the obligation to remain in the world in order to sanctify those forever embedded in lowly matter. He suggests that there is no real difference in substance between Ben Azzai and R. Akiva. The latter achieved the same lofty status as his comrade, and thus the exalted state of dying a mystical death by divine kiss did not elude him.53 Rather R. Akiva, like Abraham and Sarah, having transformed his matter into form, thereby achieving a state of pure spiritualization, was able to maintain his state of superhumanness in the world of the human. For Jacob Joseph and much of early Hasidism, this was precisely the vocation of the zaddik or, more specifically, the complete zaddik (zaddik gamur). One of the more distinctive features of early Hasidism was that biblical and rabbinic figures were viewed as exemplars of a kind of spiritual achievement that was available to select individuals in the present, that is, zaddikim. Hasidic exegesis—Jacob Joseph being a classic case—was founded on a dehistoricization of the biblical narrative in order to make it relevant to the contemporary reader.54 The practice of peshat as “contextual reading” was of little interest to most Hasidic exegetes.55 This was not because they discounted the viability of contextual reading but because their interests were more utilitarian and devotional. At least for Jacob Joseph, early Hasidic concerns were presentist and not purely textual. For the text to function as a template for individual spirituality, making categorical distinctions between what the patriarchs could achieve and what the contemporary Hasid or zaddik could achieve was counterproductive. In this sense, Hasidic exegesis brought the text and its characters closer to the reader than the standard exegetical tradition which, viewing the text itself as central, was primarily concerned with explicating and elucidating the text. Hasidic commentators seemed more interested in the ways the text could be used as a model of individual devotion and less concerned with solving inner textual problems. A more oblique speculation on the divine/human nexus can be found Jacob Joseph’s contemporary competitor Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezritch (d. 1772). In his Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov he wrote, “Can two walk together without having met?” [Amos 3:3]. It appears quite unbelievable [lit. wondrous] that spirituality [ruhaniyut elohut] can dwell in thick corporeality [be-geshem ha-yoter av]. This ability to do so is because they already dwell together in the primordial thought [mahshava kaduma] that gives life to everything. Because of this there is a connection [hitkashrut]. And this is what it

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means when it says, “and the noble are not preferred to the wretched” [Job 34:19]. And this why is there is a yod at the head and a yod at the end [of the letter ‫]א‬. The first yod is a point and the end is a point to teach that the end of all action, that of the most corporeal, already exists at the beginning of divine thought. And there is a total unity [of the highest and the lowest] in the primordial realm. Therefore the alef [‫]אלף‬, which is the same letters as peleh [wonder—‫]פלא‬, is written with a form of the yod at the head and a yod at the end and the straight line connecting them gestures to the drawing down of that which is primordial to the lowest levels. And the end is also a yod identical to the highest level.56

This text reflects the common liturgical locution in Shlomo Alkabetz’s “Lekha Dodi,” “the end of action is in the beginning of thought,”57 but what is suggested is more subtle and provocative than the liturgical formulation. Dov Baer was doing more than reiterating the adage that God dwells in the corporeal world, itself a foundation of the principle of incarnation though rarely taken to that extreme in Judaism. He was suggesting that the corporeal is in fact divine in that it exists on equal footing with the spiritual in the primordial thought of God. So Job 34:19: “and the noble are not preferred to the wretched” comes as an answer to Amos 3:3: “Can two walk together without having met?” They are “together” or unified, because they have in fact met in the divine mind. This is illustrated by the two yods in the letter alef that represent the primordial and unutterable letter of God. God can dwell in the world because both God and the world have the identical root. The pantheistic tenor of this proposition is common in Dov Baer’s writings. Yet this particular unity of the divine and the corporeal also points toward a more nuanced rendering of the divine/ human nexus instantiated in the “divine” soul and the corporeal body. While not advocating incarnation per se, it does display an instance of “incarnational thinking” that stands at the center of Hasidic teaching. Another example of traversal of the divine/human divide that prompts the question of divine corporeality and directly addresses the question of preexistence appears in Or ha-Meir of Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir (d. 1800) in the name of the Maggid of Mezritch:58 “And Abraham passed over the land as far as Shekhem” [Gen. 12:6]. This can be explained according to what I heard from the Maggid [of Mezritch] who explained the verse, “This is the story of how the heaven and earth were created [be-hibar’am ‫[ ”]בהבראם‬Gen. 2:4]. The sages awaken us to the fact that it should be “in/with Abraham” [be-Avraham ‫[ ]באברהם‬Genesis Rabba 12:9]. This

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is ­difficult because the sages count ten generations from Adam until Noah and from Noah to Abraham [Ethics of the Father 5:2]. If this is so, how can the world be established with Abraham before Abraham came into the world? What established the world in the generations before Abraham? It can be explained that in truth this is speaking about the attribute of Abraham which is kindness [hesed], the world of love that is a pure, clear world [olam bahir] that no thought can grasp. This is called the primordial Abraham [Avraham Saba]. His entire form was adorned [she-kishet malei kumato] to serve the Creator with great love until his entire body was made a chariot for the trait of love.59 His divinity and his emanating power were regulated into creation and, as the sages taught, in the past he was called the God of the heavens and now his name has become regulated among creation. This means that all creatures saw that the trait of kindness [hesed] descended into the world. It is also written in Sefer Bahir [#191] that hesed said before God, “before Abraham came I stood on my guard to bring kindness to the world. Now that Abraham has come into the world I no longer need to, as it is said, ‘in light of Abraham hearing my voice and keeping my judgments’ [Gen. 26:5]. I stood on my guard and brought kindness to the creation. By means of his [Abraham’s] righteousness and the merit of his pure body he made a complete chariot for my attribute [of kindness].” This is the explanation of “And Abraham was old and well advanced in years” [Gen. 24:1]. That is, the attribute of hesed in its place is called Avraham Saba. “Well advanced in years [well-rooted],” that is, this attribute descended and became corporeal [nitgashma] until it became well-rooted in a holy physical body, literally, in this world. Now we can understand what the sages meant when they said [in Genesis 2:4]: “This is the story of how the heaven and earth were created [be-hibar’am ‫‘ ]בהבראם‬in/with Abraham’ [be-Avraham ‫]באברהם‬.” That is, the attribute of Abraham in its place that is called Abraham the Elder [Avraham ha-Zaken],60 created and established the worlds, from the beginning of creation, from Adam until Noah, and then until Abraham. Once [the biblical] Abraham entered the world and embodied [ve-ahaz; lit. “grasped”] the attribute of hesed and merited becoming a chariot for the world of love, at that moment, Abraham took over the job of being the attribute of hesed to grant kindness to all of creation. At that moment the entire world was established because of him, literally!

The notion of primordial Abraham [Avraham Saba] appeared in the Zohar in some cases defined as “strength” [eitan].61 It is thus perfectly reasonable to state that “This is the story of how the heaven and earth were created

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[­be-hibar’am ‫ ]בהבראם‬can be read as Avraham [‫ ]אברהם‬according to the verse, “And I said, the world will be built with kindness [hesed]” (Ps. 89:3). What is intriguing in this text is the way in which this primordial Abraham was juxtaposed to and then replaced by the corporeal Abraham. The primordial Abraham owns the hesed that then emanates into the world. However, when the corporeal Abraham perfects his body—we can say divinizes his body—he embodies this attribute of hesed, making the primordial Abraham superfluous (“By means of his [Abraham’s] righteousness and the merit of his pure body he made a complete chariot for my attribute [of kindness]”). The description of Abraham as “advanced in years” means that this attribute [hesed] descended and became corporeal [nitgashma] until it became “well-rooted” in a holy physical body, literally in this world. The corporeal Abraham housed the power of hesed that was once the sole provenance of the cosmic Avraham Saba. So even though the corporeal Abraham was born ten generations after Noah, he housed the preexisting hesed upon which the world stands. Thus when the Midrash states that ­be-hibar’am [‫ ]בהבראם‬should be read as be-Avraham [‫]באברהם‬, they meant both Avraham Saba and the corporeal Abraham, because the latter became and replaced the former. What he became was the preexisting force of hesed upon which the world was established. While this text surely cannot be likened to the incarnation of High Christology, its notion that the perfected body can not only house but replace the supernal divine force—that is, that the flesh of corporeal Abraham was so pure that it essentially became Avraham Saba—does imply something about the transparency between the divine (cosmic) and the human. The fact that Hasi­ dism traffics in the ambiguity of the divine/human divide with such relative ease, especially in a time when Jews in the West were deeply invested in showing how Judaism was categorically different than Christianity, begs the question as to whether Hasidism is an illustration of a modern Judaism emerging without the apologetic agenda of its Western counterpart. A final example, from the early twentieth-century Hasidic master ­Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev (d. 1926), will round out this preliminary analysis of incarnational thinking in Hasidism. Bornstein hailed from the Hasidic Ger dynasty in Congress Poland, more specifically from the dynasty of Kotzk. His father Rabbi Avraham Bornstein (1838–1910), author of the well-known responsa Iglei Tal and Avnei Nezer, was the son-in-law of the Kotzker Rebbe ­Menahem Mendel Morgenstern (1787–1859). Bornstein’s homilies were collected in his five-volume Shem me-Shmuel.62 Using the case of the red heifer as

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an example of a law the reason for which is revealed to Moses but not to Israel, Bornstein wrote: We read in Deuteronomy Rabba [1:1], “These are the words” [Deut. 1:1] “A healing tongue is a tree of life” [Prov. 15:4]. Until Moses received the Torah he was not a man of words [Exod. 4:10]. Once he merited the Torah his “tongue was healed” and he began, “these are the words.” To understand this we need to know that the power of speech occurs though the congruence of body and the intellect [sekhel]. Hence a child cannot speak even though it has all the requisite body parts until the intellect enters. This is what is meant when the sages say, “When a child is born, an angel comes and touches his mouth and he forgets all he learned in the womb of his mother” [b.T. Niddah 30b]. Before a child is born, its soul is distinct and thus exists in a realm of pure intellect and, as such, knows the entire Torah. When it is born, its [physical] development is complete and the soul is then attached to the body, making it a living being capable of corporeal speech. The consequence is that it now forgets all that it knew before the soul, as pure intellect, became part of a corporeal body.63

Basing himself largely on Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the ­Maharal of Prague or the MaHaRaL (c. 1520–1609), Bornstein set up a standard Neoplatonic framework for his discussion of Moses, suggesting that the limitations of humanness is founded on the embeddedness of the (divine) soul in the corporeal body. The relevance to Moses is that a consequence of the transition from the pure, nonhuman intellection of the soul and the corporeality of the body is the power of speech. That Moses did not have the capacity to speak clearly suggests an anomaly in his humanness. “In fact,” wrote Bornstein, “there is something difficult in this Midrash, at least according to MaHaRal’s rendering. Meriting Torah healed Moses’s tongue (he utters, “These are the words”), whereas according to the MaHaRal it should be the opposite.”64 That is, the ­MaHaRal suggests that speech is indicative of some kind of diminishing of one’s prenatal knowledge since it is a consequence of corporeal embodiment. The Babylonian T ­ almud at Niddah 30b says that speech emerges only when Torah is forgotten, thus functioning as the vehicle [via talmud torah] to recover something lost. But this does not explain Moses’s special status. Bornstein suggested the following: The explanation for this is that through Torah, Moses’s body was purified/­ perfected [nizdakeh] and elevated to the level of his soul. Thus his soul had no limitations in unifying with his body and he was able to achieve speech. The

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soul is not subject to any change, all change occurs in the body. . . . In distinguishing between the other prophets and Moses, Maimonides explains that when the others prophesied they became different persons, as we read in I Sam. 10:6, “and you changed into another person.” When prophecy ended they returned to who they were before. Moses, however, was always in the same state. He was always prepared for prophecy. . . . This is the level of the soul without its bodily component.65

What Bornstein did here was invert the equation of humanness described by the MaHaRal to suggest that Moses achieved speech not because of his bodily nature, as was usually the case, but because his body, or corporeality, was now fully absorbed in his soul. This is a highly suggestive reversal of how the tradition understood humanness. Here Moses merited speech through his transcendence of the corporeal. It was the disembodiment of the body that allowed his soul and body to meet, thus enabling him to speak.66 Bornstein used this observation to explain the rabbinic comment that the statute of the red heifer [Num. 19:2] was revealed only to Moses, and that he did not, or could not, reveal it to Israel. It was said that Israel had access to the forty-nine levels of understanding but only Moses had access to the fiftieth level. It is this fiftieth level where the body transcends its corporeal state and reaches a state of “unchangeability” [bli shinui], a phrase almost always exclusive to the divine. “Hence, after Moses merited receiving the Torah, his body was purified/­perfected [nizdakeh] to the state of unchangeability and it was said that he reached the fiftieth gate [of understanding], . . . hence the reason for the red heifer was only revealed to Moses and, as the sages say, ‘for the others it was a statute.’”67 Bornstein’s attempt to interpret the MaHaRal’s notion of speech as the consequence of the union of body and soul/intellect to solidify the superhumanness or perhaps non-humanness of Moses suggests that Moses exists as a quasi-­divine figure, not subject to corporeality, and thus has access to knowledge that is structurally inaccessible to all who dwell in a corporeal body. Perhaps this is why he does not undergo any change when receiving prophecy. These examples illustrate a tendency throughout the history of Hasidism to give credence to the human potential to reach beyond the limits of the human. Whatever we call this—sanctification, divination, incarnation, or theosis—does not mask the fact that we are in the same structural universe of incarnational thinking when we admit the possibility of rending the veil that separates the human and the divine.68 Using the term “incarnation” enables us to view similarities in orientation while at the same time acknowledging different ­articulations

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of that phenomenon. This illuminates the ways in which Hasidism, especially in the post–World War II period, may inadvertently have brought Judaism and Christianity closer together through a spiritual system (Hasidism) in which the two faiths were thought to be irreconcilable. What matters here is that human perfection, understood as the transcendence of corporeality and physical desire and limits, was an integral part of early Hasidic enlightenment. This phenomenon was not limited to biblical characters or rabbinic heroes but, as Jacob Joseph wrote, “[was relevant] at all times.” It was a crucial part of Jacob Joseph’s work and, for him, the central contribution of his master, the Baal Shem Tov. Even limiting the discussion to cases of a single figure—such as Abraham, Sarah, or Moses—the suggestion that their bodies reached a non-corporeal state through equivalence with their soul begs what has been a crucial distinction between Judaism and Christianity.69 This is not to argue that the distinction does not exist; rather, that navigating such a distinction requires a clearer sense of commonality, one that can be better analyzed through common nomenclature. Varying Jewish and Christian responses to this question may be differences of degree or of kind. Hasidism certainly tends toward the former and, in that respect, challenges much of modern Judaism, which tilts decidedly toward the latter.

2

CHARISMA SPEAKING Uniqueness, Incarnation, and Sacred Language (Lashon ha-Kodesh) in Nahman of Bratslav’s Self-Fashioning And furthermore, my son, be admonished: of making books there is no end . . . Ecclesiastes When a great man speaks, he need not tell us about his character in order to reveal it to us. Language takes care of that. Martin Buber, “Hebrew Humanism” In speaking of the appearance of the Savior among us we must also speak of the origin of humanity. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation

I

In his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Alain Badiou offers a depiction of Christ as charisma (kharisma) to explain why, for Paul, the Christevent is that which inaugurates the universal as an antidote for the particularity of the “law.” Badiou suggests that charisma as “gift” represents the founding of the subject outside what is due to it, that is, the subject as born from grace and not as a result of works (Rom. 4:4).1 Redemption, as the universal, is only possible, argues Badiou, through charisma as it is only charisma, as the gift of what is not due, that can extend through the law and beyond it to the universal reach of grace. “Only what is charismatic, thus absolutely without cause, possesses the power of being in excess of the law, of collapsing established differences.”2 Badiou is interested in tracing the Pauline notion of overcoming the law as a necessary step in the birth of the universal from the particular. For him the Christ-event—what he calls “charisma”—introduces grace as the antidote to the law’s limited reach: “Grace is the opposite of the law as it is what comes without being due” (emphasis added).3 Badiou sees a link between universalism and charisma, the latter facilitating the birth of the former, thus charisma becomes the very epicenter of the Christ-event and the foundation upon which Christianity serves as a corrective to Judaism. Setting aside the polemical nature of

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Badiou’s claim, his point regarding the centrality of charisma for Christianity in general, and for Jewish redemptive teaching in particular, is very suggestive for our concerns. In fact, it aptly illustrates a rejection of the transition from person (Moses) to book (law) in Deuteronomy (the law as the replacement for Moses), a rejection formative to Christianity (Jesus as the fulfillment of the law), and one that exists in a more tempered and veiled form in certain strains of Judaism, particularly mysticism.4 In From Metaphysics to Midrash I argued that one of the understated points of the Deuteronomic revolution was the transition from person (Moses) to text (Torah), a revolutionary act that was never fully implemented, even centuries later, when Islam justifiably, and positively, referred to Jews as “the people of the book.”5 The attempt to substitute text for person as the vehicle of divine will was fraught with difficulty precisely because the static, lifeless text was not a carrier of charisma (despite Proverbs 3:18: “[Torah] is a Tree of Life to all who grab hold of it”). Moses—the very catalyst and perhaps bearer of revelation, the charisma (“gift”) to the Israelites—became by his own assertion in Deuteronomy the teacher of Torah (Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our Teacher).6 In fact tradition had it that for the Israelites, not knowing Moses’s burial place (Deut. 34:6) was important precisely to avert the danger charisma introduced.7 The charisma of Moses gave the Israelites the law, which in some measure e­ ffaced the person. This effacement was the source of fear and trembling for the Israelites, who feared the physical disappearance of Moses, the lifting of the “gift” from their empirical grasp (Exod. 32 and Deut. 5:5, 25–28). Post-Mosaic Jewish leaders were now bound to the law, usually acting as interpreters (for example, b.T. Baba Batra 12a: “the sage is preferred to the prophet”). Even the prophet was bound by the law, which stated that prophecy cannot be true if it mandates acting against the law (for example, Deut. 18:20). As consumers of the transition from person to text, early (Jewish) Christians, likely in line with Israelites before the advent of the Jesus movement, resisted the erasure of person in favor of text. They introduced, as the reinsertion of ­person/ charisma, the redeemer as carrier of divine will, specifically in the Christian case, as divine incarnate. Badiou defines this charisma as the gift (grace) that subverted the law and gave birth to the universal by overcoming the law’s limitations (in his view, the particular), that which created the subject outside the law (works). And for Badiou it is that subject that gives birth to the universal. In this chapter I focus on Hasidism as an example of an internal resistance to the Deuteronomic erasure of the person and the substitution of the text as

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sole carrier of divine will. Hasidism can be viewed as resisting text (book) as central in favor of person (zaddik), not unlike the resistance of Christians to the same dynamic many centuries earlier. This is perhaps one way to describe Hasidic zaddikism.8 This description is most radically apparent in the teachings of Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810). Below I present one of Nahman’s lengthy homilies, Likutei Moharan 1:19,9 which openly challenged the authority of the book, especially over the speech-act of the zaddik. Charisma came to the fore in a very stark way. Nahman viewed himself openly in opposition to a text, any text (even his own!), and suggested that “redemption” (defined by him as the inspiration for collective repentance) could only occur when the individual witnessed fully a revealed state of lashon ha-kodesh—not Hebrew but the spoken language of the zaddik—as a performance, and act, of creation. Hagiographical material suggests that Nahman viewed himself as a true innovation (hidush), one that had never before come into the world, loftier than Moses, loftier even than Adam! Max Weber has written, “charismatic authority repudiates the past, and is in this sense a specifically revolutionary force.”10 Nahman’s hidush sparked a controversy that plagued his adult life and was viewed by him and his disciples as proof of his innovative and unprecedented spirit, the opinions of the Hasidic leadership notwithstanding.11 I focus here on the nature and stature of Nahman through his own selffashioning refracted through the dual prisms of charisma and incarnation or, perhaps, charisma as incarnation. That Nahman was a charismatic is hardly new. Hagiographical literature about him attests to a persona that was as power­ful and influential as his creative teachings collected in the two-volume ­Likutei Moharan.12 Charisma, however, is a specific social category with defined parameters and criteria—as for example, in Weber’s work—and a more general notion of a divine “gift,” or perhaps a gift of divinity, as for example, the personality of the zaddik.13 The notion of charisma as divine gift will be viewed through incarnational thinking in a Jewish context.14 As discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 1, incarnation is an idea that has been viewed as exclusive to Christianity, in fact, a polemical wedge that distinguishes Christianity from Judaism.15 Yet, as scholars of Judaism and Mediterranean antiquity have shown, the origins of this notion are far from clear. Was incarnation fully adopted from Hellenistic mystery religions, or did it have roots deep in the pre-rabbinic Hellenistic and pre-Christian literature of ancient Israelite religion?16 Samuel Sandmel asserts, “In many ways Philo spoke of the Logos in ways kindred to the New Testament

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way of speaking the Logos-Christ. As to the first assertion, my opinion is this, that a Greek Jew would not have denied the possibility of the incarnation, but would have either agreed or disagreed on whether the possible incarnation of the Logos as Jesus had actually taken place.”17 The discussion remains relevant to our analysis because Hasidism has resurfaced theological tropes that since the institutionalization of Christianity have been deemed “Christian” and thus “not Jewish.” As a form of modern Judaism that developed outside the Christian gaze, Hasidism was more easily able to cultivate notions deeply embedded in the kabbalistic tradition, often clad in obtuse metaphysical language, and present them in ways that subsequently had impact in the larger arena of Jewish ideas and practices. Perhaps incarnation, while taking doctrinal form in Christianity (and even then not until the appearance of the Gospel of John in late first or early second century CE, or perhaps earlier in some Gnostic Jewish-Christian texts) was a notion that was not foreign to monotheism as it developed in the ancient world.18 Laurel Schneider’s definition of incarnation is perhaps most apt: “­Incarnation in this theological sense is not just the event of a man named Jesus who is affirmed in the Nicene creed as ‘true God from true God made man.’ Incarnation is instead a basic theological posture and starting place, an orientation toward reality that, in its attention to the mutability of bodies, undoes the logic of the One and its pretentions.”19 She is suggesting that the notion of a human—any human—as an incarnation of God undermines the reduction of God to the One. This draws an irreconcilable distinction between God and world that Hasidism challenges and even sometimes subverts. If Christianity’s monotheism is questioned because of its doctrine of Incarnation, so should Hasidism’s because of the doctrine of zaddikism. Unlike almost all other Hasidic masters, Nahman wrote mostly about himself.20 His writing concerned the complex self-fashioning of a unique zaddik, Nahman himself. While not confessional like Augustine’s Confessions, ­Likutei Moharan can arguably be read as an intricate description of the role of the ­zaddik, and more specifically the unique, charismatic zaddik as the center point of Jewish spiritual life. Nahman’s dazzling exhibition of exegetical creativity, his deep knowledge of the entire classical Jewish tradition both exoteric and esoteric, and an unwillingness to view himself as the product of any inherited authority, yielded a collection of homilies that consistently return to the redemptive role of the zaddik.21 In the pages below I focus on the interlocking tropes—charisma and incarnation—as a way to understand Nahman as the

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unique zaddik whose very self-fashioning suggests that he serves as a unique, even incarnate, nexus of the human and the divine. Nahman would surely never have used “incarnation” to describe himself (there is no Hebrew correlate to the term in any case). One of the purposes of scholarship, however, is to study a textual traditional using approaches that may be foreign to the texts but can highlight something about them that has gone unnoticed or has been suppressed.22 Nahman’s self-fashioning may not have represented Incarnation in the formal Christian doctrinal sense. Rather he considered himself one who performed an embodied and unique divine function. His description of that function was neither metaphorical nor heuristic but substantive and even hyperliteral.23

II Zaddikism was a central tenet of Hasidic spirituality, a notion that thinned the veil separating the human from the divine. In this chapter I attempt to understand the zaddik as an example of incarnational thinking through the lens of charisma.24 I begin with a brief synopsis of the work of Max Weber, who developed charisma as a sociological category of communal leadership and who juxtaposed charisma and the institution as contending, incompatible categories of social construction. Weber’s initial interest was to define the boundaries of bureaucratic social structures as they developed in an industrial society. To do so he needed a counter-category, one that challenged the social structure and stability of ­bureaucracy while preserving its foundation. This category—he called it “the patriarchal structure”—centered on “a natural leader of the daily routine.”25 Yet Weber suggested that there was another category of leadership, one that dictated beyond the normal routine, one that was counter-institutional and combative and subverted the rationalization process endemic to all bureaucracy.26 The sociological charisma Weber introduced in a “value-neutral sense”27 is a category that is temporarily in opposition to the trend of the normative, yet in most cases ultimately succumbs to that which it combats. That is, after the death of the charismatic, his or her charisma either disappears in the institutionalization process or, as in the case with Nahman, becomes an intrinsic part of the institution. Weber insisted that “in its pure form charisma . . . may be said to exist only in the process of originating.”28 This originating moment may be a time when the community of disciples witnesses the creativity of the charismatic fully disclosed. This is a time that cannot be reproduced in retelling or

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in writing.29 Hence, as we will see, for Nahman, texts and books more generally of or by the zaddik (which could only retell and never reproduce the creative moment that was the embodiment of his charisma) were limited, limiting, and deficient. In material added to Nahman’s homily Likutei Moharan 1:19 by the zaddik’s disciple Nathan of Nemerov we read, The difference between someone who learns from a book and someone who hears [the teaching] directly from the wise man is even greater. This is because a book is only for remembering, as it is written, “Write this as a reminder in the book” [Exod. 17:14]. Memory is fixed in the power of the imagination, for even an animal has memory. Thus we know that an animal can know in such a place it was bitten by a dog and thus run away from there. This is what the sages say, “words of the oral law must be written down.”30

The notion that a text is written only to remember an event but not to reproduce the event itself is an example of Nahman’s attempt to move beyond text as the key to covenantal experience. As Wolfson has shown, the Zohar and earlier Kabbalah dealt at length with textual embodiment as a way to navigate similar terrain. Daniel Boyarin, too, supports a notion of logos theology, through the text, as an alternative to incarnational theology.31 For Nahman though, the event cannot be produced in the language of the text but only through the faceto-face encounter and the witnessing of the charismatic performing the divine act of creation through language. The zaddik is witnessed as divine. Texts could only attest to, or remember, the moment but never reproduce it. Nahman’s antirabbinic posture surfaced here. Books were relegated to mere shadows of the true moment of divine disclosure. Here Nahman presaged Weber’s notion of the charismatic as social revolutionary.32 Yet Nahman’s stature as a charismatic leader in the Weberian sense is problematized in the following way. Throughout his corpus Nahman was defined by himself and others as sui generis (in Hebrew, a hidush), not one who recovered a lost tradition or even one who was the chosen savior of God—but sui generis, meaning that none like him had existed before nor would exist again, a claim full of messianic import. Hayye Moharan,33 one of a series of hagiographical works about Nahman, attests: “One time he was sitting with the holy rav, the maggid from Teravitza. As I recall it was the third meal of Shabbat. He gently grabbed the maggid’s beard and said to him, ‘An innovation [hidush] like me has never before come to the world.’”34 Is this empty boasting or does it have substantive value in the community of his disciples? How literally are we to

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under­stand it? Some years ago, a member of the Bratslav Hasidic sect and I were discussing Nahman’s assertion that he was greater than the biblical Moses. This Hasid decided to see how this radical claim has been, to use Weber’s terminology, rationalized or institutionalized in the Bratslav community. He asked a fellow Breslover Hasid he met on the street, “Do you think the Rebbe (meaning Nahman) is greater than Moses?” Without hesitation, the Hasid replied, “of course the Rebbe is greater than Moses,” and promptly went on his way.35 The controversy surrounding Nahman, especially in his lifetime, only served to confirm his self-fashioning as sui generis.36 Hayye Moharan contains the following comment, “[Nahman says,] ‘How is it possible not to oppose me since I am going in a new way that has not been achieved by anyone since the giving of the Torah? Even though it is very ancient it is completely new!’”37 Nahman’s claim of uniqueness, like that of Jesus, resulted in dissent that only strengthened his claim. In the Gospel narratives, this dissent culminated in crucifixion and resurrection, proof for Jesus’s disciples of the truth of his sui generis stature. In Nahman it resulted in humiliation and marginalization, which served as proof of his being a hidush. In both cases the claim of uniqueness was an expression of antisocial behavior, “express[ing] something that is fundamentally opposed to any order, something primitive, nascent, and unrestrained.”38 As Weber argued, the claim of uniqueness is a claim beyond authority and tradition; it stands in opposition to it. Yet the concepts of uniqueness and charisma are not identical. Nahman viewed himself as sui generis, and he was surely viewed as such by his disciples. But his inimitability did not produce what uniqueness might, it did not sustain permanent charisma. According to Jonathan Z. Smith, uniqueness is by definition a false category that can have only rhetorical, not substantive, force.39 It is always a self-undermining claim, employing the language and logic of what it seems to surpass. Nahman never really broke away from the highly institutional structure that he challenged (traditional Judaism in Eastern Europe). His disciples stayed within the boundaries of what became known as ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and he was viewed by non-disciples as simply another Hasidic master. Likely he did function as a charismatic in the Weberian sense, an individual whose claim of unrivaled particularity became one component of his charisma, which ultimately became simply another dimension of the institution to which he belonged. His claim of uniqueness/charisma, however, tells us something about his self-fashioning as a divine being, one who holds the power to create and who completes the revelatory process that Moses initiated.

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III

The homily recorded as Likutei Moharan I:19 was delivered on the night of the Jewish festival of Shavuot (Pentecost), a festival celebrating the giving of the ­Torah to Israel as described in Exodus 19–21. The custom among traditional Jews is to remain awake until dawn studying Torah (the talmudic sages suggest the actual revelation took place at midnight) to commemorate this pivotal event in the history of the Israelite and later Jewish people. Although it was never mentioned explicitly, the sui generis zaddik’s ostensible superiority to Moses served as the foundation of Nahman’s entire homily.40 It was built into his analysis of the zaddik as one whose very speech is the re-experience of creation.41 As a sui generis zaddik (elsewhere Nahman speaks of other lesser zaddikim), ­Nahman placed himself higher than the biblical Adam (or at least Adam after the creation and naming of Eve) and served almost as a Jewish counterpart to Jesus, at least as Jesus was viewed in Johannine incarnational theology. For N ­ ahman, the zaddik was embodied only in one who had overcome human limitations, for whom the boundaries separating the human and divine had become transparent.42 The witnessing of this transparency through language by hearing the zaddik speak was an event purporting to transcend revelation (which is Moses transmitting God’s word) and reaching back to creation, where, as the Midrash says, “God spoke and the world came to be.”43 As the arbiter of Sinaitic revelation, Moses gave us what Boyarin calls logos theology.44 Going further, Nahman, the unparalleled zaddik who created with his language, gave us incarnational theology. The notion of creation as overcoming or completing revelation is further supported by the opening citation from Sifra de-Zniuta (a small opaque section of the Zohar) that serves as the lemma of Nahman’s homily: “As long as there was no scale, there was no providence face-to-face.” This enigmatic passage has usually been interpreted to refer to the act of creation. While the context of the homily was revelation with Moses as the hero (it was delivered on Shavuot night), creation was the dominant motif. It was creation that allowed Nahman to transcend the revelation at Sinai (and thus Moses as teacher and Torah as book). In this sense the homily in its context was an act of subversion. If Nahman was the zaddik and the homily was about creation, it undermined the event of revelation facilitated by the biblical Moses on the very night when Moses should be celebrated. While Moses was the arbiter of revelation, the sui generis zaddik was the arbiter of its completion, that is, creation. What is done by seeing oneself in the face of the zaddik when the zaddik is enacting lashon ha-kodesh is not repentance for a particular sin or transgression but for the sin

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of Adam and Eve. Witnessing the zaddik thus brings one past the commandments of Sinai and back to creation. It makes perfect sense that Nahman had to prove his worth by construing himself as sui generis. He did not have any credentials of discipleship nor did he claim any mentor. His claim to authority rested on two foundations, his genealogy—he was a great-grandson of Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, although he did not place much emphasis on that fact—and his own personal charisma.45 His claim of uniqueness, the most radical claim a charismatic can make, was an illustration of Weber’s theory of charismatic personalities detached from any institutional legitimation that would require the subject to legitimate himself again and again. His authority and charisma were expressed through his words as the disclosure of the divine, words recorded in his book, words largely about himself, his mission, stature, and authority. If the book was written for posterity, as it seems to have been (most of the homilies were recorded after Nahman contracted tuberculosis, which he knew would take his life), and if he did not envision any successor (he clearly did not), it makes sense that the book itself must have been a testament to his uniqueness, a kind of sacrament.46 The words of the sui generis zaddik became the flesh of his body; they became the word of God. It was Nahman himself who claimed that no book can ever capture the true sense of uniqueness. Nevertheless, ­Nahman sought to enshrine his charisma in a permanent way in his book. His book was the logical outcome of this claim for uniqueness and the testament to his continued validity. Another dimension of Nahman’s contribution merits note. Unlike most other charismatics, Nahman’s personality was embedded in a book, Likutei ­Moharan, that his disciples to this day claim is as sacred as Scripture itself. More than almost any other Hasidic or kabbalistic text, it was a book essentially about its author. Ostensibly it was the externalization of Nahman’s personhood or, to invert the incarnational theology of the Gospel of John, in this book the flesh of Nahman became the word. The question of Likutei Moharan as autobiography has been a topic of much scholarly interest, and the genre of autobiography is itself quite vexing.47 For example, Paul de Man raises the issue: “We assume that life produces the auto­ biography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all aspects, by the

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resources of his medium.”48 While all texts, to some degree, are autobiographical (de Man suggests that “any book with a readable title page is, to some extent, autobiographical”) all are not devoted to the explicit task of self-fashioning, de Man’s “self-portraiture.” Likutei Moharan is precisely that, not the telling of a life but creating a portrait of Nahman himself veiled in the anonymity of the sui generis zaddik (zaddik amiti). Therefore, all of the subsequent historiographical literature about Nahman written by his disciples is less about the historical person, of whom we know quite little, and more about the portrait Nahman himself paints in his homilies. Likutei Moharan I:19 was essentially about the power of orality as opposed to the power of the book.49 More than that, it undermined the very legitimacy of the book as a vehicle for lashon ha-kodesh,50 which Nahman understood as “the language of the zaddik.”51 It assumed that witnessing the spoken word of the sui generis zaddik was an experience that could not be reproduced through oral transmission (that is, another telling over the word of the zaddik) or a book (reading the oral discourses of the zaddik). Yet the experience of the word spoken by this zaddik was more than an experience of revelation (remember this homily was delivered on Shavuot); it was an experience of creation, what I call “revelation revealed.”52 Hence the zaddik was not like Moses, who heard and transmitted the word of God. The zaddik was the very origin of revelation itself, an instantiation of the divine in which flesh becomes word. The transition from revelation to creation occurred through the sui generis zaddik, ­Nahman himself. For example, in Sihot ha-Ran we read, It is obvious that we see in one who merits true innovation [she-zohin le-hadash] the revelation of God moving from nothing to something [me-ayin le-yesh]. Beforehand, we knew nothing of this hidush. Now he [the zaddik, Nahman] draws from the source of all wisdom [hokhma] which is ayin [eternality or no-thing] which is eyn sof. With this see witness with the mind’s eye [eynei ha-sekhel] the revelation of God.53

Witnessing the zaddik speaking his torah, which was always “new” (hidush), amounted to witnessing the transmogrification of the materiality to infinitude, the flesh of the zaddik into the word of God, that is lashon ha-kodesh in its pure state.54 In another passage we read, “Thus we find that there is God’s Torah and there is God’s prayer. And when one merits being encompassed in the eyn sof, then his Torah is God’s Torah (mamash; lit. “and when and his prayer is God’s prayer literally”).55 Nahman’s intent in this passage is not clear, but the emphatic

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“literally” is a strong endorsement of a view that there is something here that is more than metaphorical or heuristic.56 In this sense, Nahman was inverting Christian incarnational theology in the service of Judaism. The book, his book, the words of the zaddik as written, now became the body of the zaddik. Nahman’s approach shared a similarity with apostolic Christianity; both the zaddik in his homilies and Jesus as depicted in the Gospels represented charismatic critiques of Rabbinic Judaism. Regarding Christianity, Boyarin puts it this way, “For the Rabbis, Torah supersedes Logos, just as for John, Logos supersedes Torah . . . if for John the Logos Incarnate in Jesus replaces the Logos revealed in the Book, for the Rabbis the Logos Incarnate in the Book displaces the Logos that subsists anywhere else but in the Book.”57 In some ways, Nahman’s claim inverted the Christian incarnational claim that sought to undermine rabbinic orthodoxy. Having grown up in a milieu of rabbinic textuality, he argued against logos theology, against the incarnation of God in the book symbolized by the House of Study, the rabbinic transition from written to oral law, and argued for the speech of the zaddik, that is, Nahman himself, as the full articulation of divine language. Being witness to such an event effaced the legitimacy of the book. In the spirit of Hasidism, Nahman moved away from the book and back to the person, against Moses’s last will in Deuteronomy 30:11–14 that the Israelites should take the law for themselves in a book. In this sense, logos theology as incarnationalism returned to Judaism, offering a critique of the rabbis not dissimilar to that of Christianity. Nahman opened his homily delivered on Shavuot 5564 (Tuesday evening, May 16, 1804) with a critique of the book:58 Everyone wonders. Why is it necessary to travel to the zaddik to hear directly from his mouth (‫ ?)לשמוע בפיו‬. . . There is a big difference between someone who hears directly from the true zaddik himself and someone who reads someone else who repeats it in his name . . . So too there is even a greater difference between someone who hears it directly from the zaddik and someone who studies from a book.59

This distinction is not in concert with rabbinic teaching. While valuing the proper attribution of a specific teaching, the rabbis did not view the experience of hearing the words directly from the master as a prerequisite for achieving knowledge.60 The reason lay at the center of Nahman’s homily and his self-­ fashioning. Nahman linguistically tied witnessing the spoken word of the zaddik to an experience of creation, which was the context of this lesson. ­Moreover,

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witnessing the word might not even require understanding the h ­ idush therein. Hayye Moharan advised, “See with your eyes that you have merited hearing these things. Even if you do not hear the hidush and only merit being present when the hidush is delivered, be happy that you merited this. This is even more the case if you merit hearing the hidush once a year and even if you only hear once in a lifetime, this is sufficient.”61 By mixing the experience of sight and sound, Nahman stressed the concept of witnessing an event rather than cognitively studying and learning. Hearing the hidush “even once in a lifetime” suggested that the event was permanently transformative. In a society midway between orality and literacy, the rabbinic sages were distressed that their words might become part of a written document. Nonetheless, knowing that it was inevitable, they permitted writing.62 Living in a world awash with books and where everything seemed to be written down, at a time when publishing was on the rise, Nahman struck out against the book precisely because he knew that it institutionalized, and thus undermined, c­ harisma.63 Sadly, he was right—he became incarnate in his own words, in his own book. “The zaddik has a pure face. Everyone who witnesses the face of the zaddik can see his own face as in a mirror. One who looks into the face of the zaddik when he is speaking will, without regret, immediately realize how he is immersed in darkness and will feel remorse.”64 The way the zaddik achieves this “perfected” face that shines (an allusion to Moses at Sinai in Exodus 34:29, 30, 35) is through lashon ha-kodesh (lit. “Hebrew,” but here specifically hearing the words of the zaddik)65 because only lashon ha-kodesh has the unique quality of lashon nofel al lashon (“language falling over, or out of, itself ”).66 With lashon nofel al lashon, Nahman employed a rabbinic construction of ish and isha (the former identical to the latter with an additional ‫ ה‬at the end) denoting that Adam, in naming all of creation, and woman in particular, used language that was also the language of creation. In Nahman, woman (isha) became a conventional and inferior language for Adam (ish) (a language he created), not the fully revealed lashon ha-kodesh of the unique zaddik. Nahman wished to exhibit how the Hebrew language was first utilized by Adam as a tool to create Eve. The task given to Adam to name all the creatures was intertwined with the creation of Eve (Gen. 2:18–22). The creation of Eve via divine fiat and then through being named by Adam, “This one shall be called woman” (Gen. 2:23), was, in fact, the creation of conventional language that had to be purified by the zaddik to complete Adam’s appointed task (that is, to overcome his sin, of which naming thus creating Eve was a part). Through a series of exegetical

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moves in Genesis, he rendered Eve in a form of language depicted as the flesh of the Tree of Knowledge. This was called by Nahman the language of translation, or targum, which contained the sacred; that is, it contained remnants of lashon ha-kodesh but required further rectification by the unique zaddik. 67 Eve (‫ )אשה‬contains the letters of Adam (as ‫ )איש‬with the substitution of ‫ י‬for ‫ ה‬at the end, hence “language falling out of itself.”68 This will become important for us later on, because woman is also the embodiment of carnality ‫( ה‬being the letter representing the feminine sefirah of malkhut), the very thing that prevented the zaddik from speaking pure lashon ha-kodesh. For the unique zaddik to speak his language of creation, she (woman, carnality, translation) had to be reabsorbed into him whence she originated.69 Only then would the zaddik transcend carnality (­efface the object of his desire) and become able to utilize perfected language to inspire repentance. So here Adam spoke the language that is woman, which he now had to reabsorb into his own flesh in order to complete what God began, as recorded in Genesis 1.70 By tying the countenance of the perfected face (“the zaddik has a pure face”) to Adam’s naming of Eve, Nahman wove together creation and revelation, a theme that informed the entire homily. This first appeared in the Sifra de-Zniuta passage about the scales that was cited as the lemma to this homily. Revelation, the introduction of God’s word to the fleshiness of the world, was in need of re-creation or completion through the transformation of flesh (the carnal as brought into existence in Eve) back into the pure word (perfected lashon ha-kodesh).71 Johannine logos theology becoming incarnation theology, instantiated in the body of Jesus (John 1:14), may complete revelation, but in Nahman’s view it was only the perfected language of the unique zaddik that could complete creation.72 The correlation of revelation and creation suggested that revelation fully revealed was only a moment of witnessing creation: by witnessing the zaddik speak, the listener “sees himself as he truly is and repents.” Witnessing such a creation moment, the disciple would be exposed to the very core of his being, thus “revealing” that which was need of repair. In this sense, only creation could make revelation redemptive. Nahman suggested yet another interpretation of lashon nofel al lashon (“language that falls out of itself ”), in this case meaning that the perfected language of lashon ha-kodesh descended upon and subjugated all other languages. A better translation of lashon nofel al lashon might be “(holy) language that falls upon (evil) language.”73 Adopting a passage from the Zohar that mentioned certain angels crushing the seventy stars (referring to the seventy nations),

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Nahman offered a hyperliteral reading that lashon ha-kodesh, his language of Torah, subjugated all other languages of Torah—meaning all other expressions of Torah that were not from the mouth of the sui generis zaddik, or perhaps all other speakers of Torah that did not acknowledge his unprecedented hidush. Nahman linked the Zohar’s comments about good language versus evil language, embodied in Israel versus the nations, and drew the reader back to his previous discussion about carnality. The comprehensive evil in which all the evil of the seventy nations is encompassed is the burning inferno of carnal lust. This carnality is destroyed and nullified and is disempowered due to lashon ha-kodesh. This corresponds to the conflagration of the seventy nations mentioned in the Zohar, namely the comprehensive evil, which is the burning inferno of carnal desire in which all the seventy nations are absorbed.74

Perhaps this was an instance where Nahman turned the Zohar’s affront to the gentile nations into an attack on his own Jewish detractors.75 That is, those who denied the unique quality of his hidush, those who denied him the unique status of the sui generis zaddik, were acting out of original sin, whereby their inability to transcend carnality prevented them from recognizing his unique qualities. Nahman says, “The entire world needs me. I am not talking about you [my disciples] as you know that you need me. But even the other zaddikim need me because they also need to return to the good. And even all the other nations of the world need me.”76 Recall Weber’s observation that charismatic leadership, here illustrated via the power of creation through the speech act, undermines the foundation of institutional culture, in this instance those who question Nahman’s self-fashioning. Nahman distinguished between the sui generis zaddik and all others who taught Torah (in the above citation, those who spoke the seventy languages, perhaps an allusion to the seventy faces of Torah) on the presence or absence of carnality. In the Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 13a, it is suggested that there are angels of carnal desire that speak only when God is silent. These angels are crushed, or silenced, when lashon ha-kodesh is spoken, that is, when the zaddik, or in the Talmud, God, speaks. The only one who can extinguish carnality is one who has already overcome it—a feat Nahman claimed to have achieved as part of his vocation. Nahman’s oft-cited quip that “to me men and women are the same”77 spoke to his claim of having overcome carnal desire.78 In order to fulfill his desire, Adam created carnality, and thus conventional language,

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by naming Eve. In some sense, then, Adam’s sin was not coupling with Eve but creating her. But the creation of Eve was simultaneously Adam’s demise and the only key to his completion, because she was also the language of translation or targum, the bridge that enabled Adam to subdue carnality through reabsorption.79 Denying his own carnality by abstaining from the seduction of Potiphar’s wife, the biblical Joseph illustrated the character of the sui generis zaddik (Gen.  39:8, 9). As the archetypal zaddik in rabbinic Midrash and Kabbalah, Joseph is deployed here as the biblical figure who achieved the “perfection of lashon ha-kodesh.”80 That is, Joseph successfully overcame his desire for his master’s wife. For Nahman, however, this heroic overcoming of temptation was not sufficient. The true zaddik—that is, Nahman himself—had to go even further than Joseph. He had to overcome carnality entirely, meaning here both the desire for women and the language of translation, by reabsorbing them into his flesh, bringing the Tree of Knowledge (woman and targum) into the Tree of Life. This was not simply the overcoming of carnality (Joseph) but its eradication. At this point in the homily, the narrative of Genesis 2 and 3 becomes prominent. Nahman delineated three forms of language. The first was profane language embodied in the demonic or the serpent. The second was an intermediate form of lashon ha-kodesh, symbolized as targum, which was the Tree of Knowledge. The third form was complete lashon ha-kodesh, which was the Tree of Life. The language of translation appears to be Nahman’s rendering of conventional torah, or perhaps the torah of the zaddik that is heard through a retelling or read from a book.81 Such torah contains lashon ha-kodesh but not the experiential component of witnessing the language as creation. Targum is thus lashon ha-kodesh without a face, language that has not yet been purged of carnality. For Nahman there was something promiscuous about translation. It exposed something that should remain concealed. In Nahman’s mind translation, like woman, was something that simply could not be trusted but was nonetheless something man needed. (Nahman’s audience, of course, was exclusively male). Thus in this homily, Eve or woman more generally had three faces, the woman of folly, the woman of wisdom, and the woman of “intellect.”82 This is because targum contains both good and evil. There are times when it possesses maskil [“intellect”] and there are times when it is the quality of mishakel [“destruction”]. And this woman of folly uses the woman of intellect to lure the woman of wisdom. This is because the strength of the force of evil is only via ­targum as it is written, “An Aramean tried to destroy my ancestor” [Deut. 26:5]

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and, “Balak has brought me from Aram” [Num. 23:7]. These both refer to the language of targum, Aramaic, from which the forces of evil draw life from the holy.83

For Nahman there were essentially three categories of woman: the woman of folly, the woman of wisdom, and the woman of intellect. The first embodied the seventy evil nations and was likened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden who seduced Eve (embodying the two other categories in different forms).84 That is, before partaking of the Tree of Knowledge, Eve was the woman of wisdom, but afterwards she contained a mixture of good and evil and could either represent the woman of intellect (maskil, the second category) or the woman of wisdom (hokhma). In becoming targum (between folly and wisdom or holy and profane) she was untrustworthy, yet necessary to the zaddik in that she provided the means for the transition from revelation back to creation.85 Toward the end of his homily, Nahman made it clear that targum is a vehicle necessary for the completion of this perfection.86 Even though lashon ha-kodesh came from above, it could only be perfected through targum, that is, by clarifying and separating the good in targum, the beneficence in the Tree of Knowledge. This could only be realized, however, by one who did not become entrapped in carnal desire, because Eve/targum/woman of intellect contained both the woman of folly and the woman of wisdom. Only the unique zaddik— he who could stand where Adam stood and persevere—could accomplish such a feat. The byproduct of this accomplishment was hidush “that has never before come into this world.” The result was the full disclosure of revelation as re-creation. The story of Adam and Eve permits one to re-envision and overcome revelation. Nahman as the zaddik was not likened to Moses, who transmitted the divine word, but to Adam who created with it. While the Bible and the sages spoke of Moses’s shining face, they also said that he was required to wear a veil to conceal it (Exod. 34:35). Nahman noted, “Before lashon ha-kodesh was perfected, ‘there was no providence face to face.’ This is essentially because ‘face to face’ is the result of ‘God spoke to you.’”87 That is, the “face to face” of ­Moses’s experience at Sinai was a shadow of the “face to face” mentioned in Sifra ­de-Zniuta, that is, of creation. The former was a secondhand transmission, the latter a direct experience of the creative power of language. Lashon ha-kodesh perfected is revelation revealed, which is creation. Moses at Sinai was thus revelation concealed, and this produced the convention of Torah as targum. Eve, as a premature form of lashon ha-kodesh, was both an aid and an obstacle to Adam, or Nahman, who was the unique zaddik. She was created

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through Adam’s sleep (tardema). As long as he still desired her, his language would always be targum (connecting the words targum and tardema through numerology or gematria—649 and 650 respectively). Only Nahman, who claimed to have expunged his carnal desire, could surpass Moses and complete Adam’s mission. Although Moses assented to God’s call for celibacy, he did not transcend desire. Having overcome carnality, however, the unique zaddik’s language became purely creative and thus divine. Unmentioned but underlying this is that in Genesis Adam seemed to lose the power to name creation once he had named Eve. In his carnality, desiring what he created, Adam became fully human and thus lost the power and potential to speak lashon ha-kodesh. He and Eve were banished from the Garden, lest they eat of the Tree of Life (perfected lashon ha-kodesh) and “live forever” (Gen. 3:22). From this homily can it be said that Nahman was the unique zaddik who embodied both perfected lashon ha-kodesh and the Tree of Life and had, in fact transcended his humanity? Earlier we saw that witnessing the zaddik speak lashon-ha-kodesh was an overcoming of revelation. At the conclusion of the homily Nahman was more explicit on this central point: This is the difference between hearing something from a teacher, from a student, or seeing it in a book. The zaddikim are “strong warriors who make His word” [osei devaro] [Ps. 103:20]. This corresponds to the Midrash “The Holy One consulted with the souls of the zaddikim and created the world.” . . . [Genesis Rabba 8:7]. This is because the zaddikim are synonymous with “making His word” [osei devaro]. They make the word of God in order that he speak and create the world. This all happened before creation. Now, too, when the zaddikim want to hear God’s word, they first make the word as it says “and they make the word.” Afterward, they hear the word they make from God, as it is written, “to hear the sound of His word.” It is with this word that God speaks to them.88

While God as Logos surely did not become flesh here it may very well be that the flesh of the zaddik became word/Word. The disciple, the one who witnessed this act, was immediately remade by becoming sensitized to his own carnality, thus inspiring repentance.89 The flesh of the zaddik, having become master of language/woman by absorbing her as part of himself, a reversal of Genesis 2:23, “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” was already beyond carnality and had thus moved beyond conventional language, conventional Torah, and revelation. Free of carnality, the flesh of the zaddik became the word of God, lashon

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­ a-kodesh in a perfected creative state. There is a compelling image here about h the zaddik creating God’s word then listening to his own creation. And his speaking that word was the speech of God.

Conclusion Weber taught that the charismatic person will always try to undermine the authority of the institution for at least two reasons. First, bureaucracy routinizes society, establishes itself as the authority, and thereby undermines the authority of charisma. Second, the institutional authority will always undermine the independent claims of the charismatic person who has no roots in the institution. That is, charismatic authority must remain free of the institution that presents a competing model of authority. One question might be, how far does the charismatic go? John has Jesus undermining Torah by taking language, the oral law from heaven, and making it human. In doing so, language, or Torah, ceases to function as the vehicle of devotion. Since logos theology is a rabbinic idea, Rabbinic Judaism has been undermined, as Boyarin suggests, by Jewish Christians who sought to trap it in the snare of its own doctrine.90 The implications of a comparison of Nahman’s self-fashioning with Christianity’s fashioning of Jesus should not be underestimated. We have suggested that by arguing that the words of the zaddik are not merely torah but the flesh of the zaddik becoming word, they constitute an inversion of the Johannine creed. As illustration we can return to Boyarin’s notion of the twin-birth of Judaism and Christianity in his Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-­Christianity. There he argues that the rabbinic claim of authority based on the doctrine of “the Torah is from heaven” does not refer to the written but rather the oral law. That is to say, it is the words the rabbis speak in the House of Study that are from heaven. In terms of rabbinic claims about its own authority, the written law is beside the point. The institutional authority of Rabbinic Judaism is built upon the proposition that the House of Study is filled with the (spoken) words of God (rabbinic study is also called talmud torah). In one sense, this is the institutional foundation Nahman challenged. For ­Nahman the world of Torah study may have been “from heaven,” but it was not an expression of the perfect state of lashon ha-kodesh. That is, the words of the sages are not divine; they are not heaven on earth, because only the sui generis zaddik can speak the language of God. Only he is more than human. For Nahman everyone but him was merely translating, that is, functioning in the realm of targum.

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Leaving aside the distinctions between logos theology and incarnational theology, the notion of the zaddik in Nahman represents the nexus of the two. Incarnational theology yields a new kind of logos theology. For Nahman the words of the zaddik (his torah) were the externalization of his body. Body and word became fused and, as such, logos theology (T/torah as divine) and incarnational theology (body as divine) merged.91 Whereas John proclaimed, “the word becomes flesh,” Nahman suggested that when the zaddik speaks, his “flesh becomes Word.”92 This is because Nahman’s focus was not so much the words spoken but the witnessing of the spoken word; that is, being face to face with the zaddik when he spoke. When his homily was delivered, Nahman’s disciples came to hear him speak about revelation, about Sinai as the origin of Torah, about the lofty ideal of Torah study. This has remained the custom among Jews. It was, after all, the evening of the festival of Shavuot, a night devoted to Torah study as the commemoration of revelation. Instead, on a festival when the book itself is the subject of celebration (the receiving of the Torah) Nahman subversively began his discourse citing Sifra de-Zniuta about creation and continued explicitly to undermine the book as flawed and unredeemable. He moved on to the very “unrabbinic” idea that witnessing the language of the zaddik was the only way to achieve personal and collective transformation (that is, to see one’s human flaws and repent). Lashon ha-kodesh, not Torah, becomes the embodiment of the zaddik. Or rather: lashon ha-kodesh in a perfected state points to the disembodied body of the zaddik. The flesh of this unique zaddik is no longer carnal. Nahman turned the rabbinic notion of the Torah as the Tree of Life into the idea of the unique zaddik as the Tree of Life.93 Through exegesis he subverted many of the founding principles of the rabbinic project, and like John he did so by deploying the rabbinic notion of logos theology as it applies to Torah and, moving toward incarnation theology, turned it to apply to the zaddik. If we view Nahman’s move here in the context of Johannine thinking we can see that he was also extending the Christian claim of logos theology as moving in the right direction but still incomplete. John made the word into flesh in the body of Jesus. Nahman made the flesh into word through the speech of the zaddik. Perhaps John viewed Jesus as the completion of revelation and thus the necessary extension of the covenant toward its fulfillment. For Nahman that was insufficient. He said the sui generis zaddik goes even further and completes creation. The specter of Weber hovers over all this. Nahman’s claims of uniqueness could never be substantiated. He is remembered primarily by his book, the

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very object he despised. His claim to have the capacity to complete creation, and thus bring redemption by having others witness his uniqueness, was cut short by his untimely death at the age of 38. More to the point, his claim of uniqueness brought forth no revolution, nor even, as for Jesus, another institution. Rather, at most he created a subset of the existing institution of ­Hasidic Judaism. His claim of uniqueness was part of his charisma, but in the end ­charisma was all there ever was.

3

JEWISH ETHICS THROUGH A HASIDIC LENS Incarnation, the Law, and the Universal The very same person is at once God and man, God our end, man our way. Saint Augustine, City of God It is clearly evident that man either through grace is made like unto God and shares his divinity, and without grace he is treated like the beasts of the field. Pascal, Pensées

I It has become popular for those who write about religion to write about religious ethics.1 Yet in his introduction to The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, William Schweiker makes the often overlooked point that “‘ethics’ or ‘moral philosophy’ is not indigenous to the world’s religions.”2 By indigenous he apparently means that ethics, as conventionally conceived, is a product of Greek and Roman thinking about rational ways to negotiate living among family, neighbors, strangers, friends, and enemies in a way that fosters happiness and well-being (eudaimonia). Conventionally, religion is about belief in and the practical, ritualistic, and normative ways that individuals relate to a divine being or transcendent idea.3 Notwithstanding the limited formulation of ethics and religion (both are scholarly constructions) and while the two may have limited room for one another, they are not easily compatible.4 Yet most religious traditions have some form of ethics, defined loosely as normative ways individuals should relate to, behave toward, and value one another. In biblical religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) ethics is born from the complex ways relations with the biblical God are mixed with biblical mandates toward the human other. To complicate matters, in modern times these religions are challenged by the Kantian imperative that ethics can have no modifier, that ethics cannot be tied to any particular religion. All religions can have ethics but there is no “Jewish,” “Christian,” or “Muslim” ethics per se.

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Nancy Levene offers a felicitous formulation of the Kantian position. Discussing the notion that holiness in both Judaism and Christianity is focused on imitation, that is, imitatio Dei or imitatio Christi (I Cor. 11:1), Levene writes, “In [Kant’s] model, it is the moral human being I am to imitate in my conduct, and I need to look no further for the model than my own heart. Prima facie this would seem to insist that insofar as Judaism has an ‘ethics,’ this ethics cannot be (solely) Jewish.”5 Compare this to the anti-Kantianism espoused by the Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz: But the text of the Shema says: “And that you may not go astray not after your own heart and after your own eyes.” The prohibition of following “your own heart” is a negation of Kant’s great principle; the prohibition of following “your own eyes” is the rejection of the great principle of Socrates. And the reason of these two negations is: “I am the Lord your God.” The believing man is guided by his consciousness of his standing before God, not before man. His judgment is not moral.6

For Leibowitz the holy and the good are distinct and incompatible categories. For Kant perhaps, the holy and the good function in tandem if the holy is the moral human being. Therein lies the tension as religions try to navigate the Kantian challenge with their devotional commitment to divine obedience. This chapter examines the question of “Jewish” ethics, as viewed in Hasidism, given the tension illustrated by Levene and Leibowitz. This is based on Hasidism’s broader notion that the barrier separating God and the human, and God and the world, is much more permeable than non-mystical or nonHasidic Judaism would have it. Below I argue that Hasidic ethics was founded upon love of the (divine) other rather than law or supererogation, that is, an approach similar to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In order to contextualize this rendering of “Jewish” ethics (or Jewish “ethics”), we follow the Hasidic analysis with an exploration of the viability of the term “ethics” as applied to Judaism, specifically as it relates to the law (halakha) and the question of the universal versus the particular.7 The early Hasidic master Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk (1730–1788) offered an incarnational model of “Jewish” ethics, and his younger colleague Levi Isaac of Berdichev (1740–1809) offered a universalist model founded on a similar incarnational principle. Before we can inquire as to how this Hasidic incarnational ethics would fit into the larger discussion of modern Jewish ethics, however, we need to ask, what would an incarnational Jewish ethics look like?

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II Christianity has long posited that Christian ethics was founded upon the notion of the reconciliation between the divine and the human in the figure of ­Jesus of Nazareth.8 This divine completion of humanity,9 extending from Jesus to his community through faith and works, enables human beings to act toward one another’s “incarnated divinity,” achieved through faith in the full reconciliation of spirit and flesh in Jesus Christ.10 This divine expression is love.11 It is often argued that Judaism was based in part on the rejection of the doctrine of reconciliation or incarnation (both its substance and form), holding that the biblical covenant was, and will always remain, between God (who is not human) and human beings (who are not God), the latter being created only “in God’s image” (Gen. 1:27).12 The focus on divine presence in classical Jewish sources, even in light of its dialectical tension with divine transcendence (the dialectic is endemic to Christian incarnationalism as well) in some cases results in incarnational thinking that extends beyond the more innocuous term “indwelling.”13 That is, if incarnational thinking is defined from a Jewish perspective as “the notion that God [permanently] enters the world of humanity,”14 a view that has strong precedent in Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism certainly would constitute an incarnational religion. While the human fully becoming God (and yet remaining truly human) was never explicitly affirmed in classical Jewish sources, and was polemically rejected out of hand from the time Jews became aware of Christianity’s doctrinal claims, bridging the chasm between God and the human being, presented perhaps as God in the human being, appeared quite often in the mystical literature that informed Hasidism and may also have influenced early Christian doctrine.15 This notion was even more pronounced in Hasidism. Hasidism elevated the zaddik (“righteous master”) to a place where he was sometimes portrayed provocatively as the nexus between the divine and the human.16 This suggests or at least invites an incarnationalist approach extending beyond what is found in rabbinic and even classical mystical literature.17 Moreover, Hasidism shifted the focus of attention from the realm of the metaphysical to the personal— from the transcendent God who can be known through the cosmos to the immanent God who can be known through engagement with the world. Martin Buber was harshly criticized for his articulation of this paradigm shift, which, while self-serving in that it enabled him to link Hasidism to his own religious existentialism, is more accurate than often thought, even given selected textual evidence to the contrary.18

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If individuals can become infused with God to the extent that their divine self becomes the exclusive arbiter of their actions, as happens in the Hasidic texts that follow, the external framework of commandment may no longer be necessary, or at least not remain the exclusive mode of worship.19 In this incarnational moment, human autonomy and the divine become joined, creating an ethical stance that is infused with divinity but not the consequence of commandment. In Eastern Orthodoxy this is called “synergy,” a doctrine that refers to a “cooperation” between the divine will and the human will in every individual. Synergy is linked both to the incarnation and to the theosis of h ­ umanity. The incarnation implies the moment of the full integration of the perfected human will in the divine will in Jesus Christ. Theosis is the process whereby the individual reaches a similar place.20 It has often been said that Jewish ethics is an expression of the divine self/ soul that relates to the “other” as a divine image, using the divine attributes of mercy and kindness as models for interhuman relations.21 While this is supported by many classical sources, it is too simplistic a definition for Hasidism. For a Jewish pietism that focuses on the innate divinity of the person and on the presumption that the person qua person can experience a state of communion (devekut) between the human and the divine, the metaphorical interpretation of divine image does not adequately capture its spirit. Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk lived most of his adult life in the city of Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, and was a contemporary of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. He emigrated to Palestine late in life and continued to teach publicly until his death. His collected teachings and correspondence appeared in one volume entitled Pri ha-Aretz (Fruit of the Land ).22 Menahem Mendel presents what I argue is a more nuanced version of the Jewish idea of humanity’s divine image and the part it plays in the expression of ethics, a version that crosses over from indwelling to incarnation. The first part of the text analyzed below addresses the question of preliminaries, that is, what is the existential posture necessary to create the possibility of being overcome by the divine. What is suggested is a stance of absolute impotence, emptying oneself of will to make room for the influx, and subsequent incarnation, of God. The first principle is to know that a person has no power to perform any mitzvah or moral act, and no power to achieve communion with God’s ways [­u-ledabek b’darkhei ha-Shem], without God Himself igniting the fire of love and fear within

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him. If God should say, “I do not desire him,” all the rams of Nebaioth23 will not help him achieve sanctity. [If God does not want him], even one who is mighty is beyond help. “If you are righteous what does he revive from Your hand” [Job 35:7]. How can one achieve sanctity and righteousness without God’s mercy and grace, as it says, “Grace is Yours, for You complete man’s actions” [Ps. 62:13]? Therefore, one cannot hope to begin a devotional life without first ordering [­siddur] one’s recognition of divine dependence [shivho shel makom] and contemplating one’s own worthlessness. That is, one must first contemplate that human beings are made of lowly matter, dirt from the earth. His eyes would not see, his ears would not hear, and his heart would not understand without God’s constant intervention, as it says, “Shall He who plants the ear not hear, He who forms the eye not see?” [Ps. 94:9]. One has no power even to speak without the words being planted in their mouth by God, as it says, “God, open my lips” [Ps. 51:17].24

This text, along with the others analyzed below, contains two fundamental flaws in terms of its use for any modern ethical theory. First, it appears to traffic in a stale Platonic dualism. The lowliness of the human being seems to support the absolute distinction between the human and the divine that is deconstructed in these texts. To say the human being is nothing unless his very humanness is effaced in order to receive God is to say that the human being is nothing. If Hasidism is a pietism that tries to break through this dualism, it must do so by fashioning selfhood in a way that does not maintain the dualistic distinctions implied in Neoplatonism. Second, these texts include a great deal about the self; in fact, they seek to define the self yet never make clear what they mean by the self. That is, who is the self that is being effaced and who is the self that emerges from that effacement? Is the empty human vessel filled with God a new human self? A fully realized self? A new Adam? Is there a self that survives after sovereign volition is effaced? The texts are too opaque on these questions to construct a full answer (it is not clear the authors even asked themselves these questions). For now, this preliminary state of absolute impotence is required because Menahem Mendel held that part of the human self is the autonomous will that invariably interprets human action as sovereign and is thus severed from divine dependence. That is, the sovereign will expresses itself against any divine other, even as that other may dwell within the self. The effacement of this dimension of the self (non-God), however, is followed by the influx and

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subsequent incarnation of divinity into the impotent human vessel, enabling that individual to love. This [impotence] is also true of love and fear. Who is the beloved if it isn’t the divinity that God causes to descend into the human soul? And who would love the soul [without that divinity]? What is [the origin of this] love? Love is mined from the essence of divinity that descends in the human soul and becomes rooted in the material world, becoming compacted [mit’zamzem] in the “small world” [olam katan], that is the human being.25 Every moment of one’s existence is in the midst of God, because God is the “place of the world/humankind,” the One who surrounds and fills all worlds.26 When this love takes root [and grows] in the individual, it cannot be contained. All of his possessions are diminished against its power. Everything is seen as God-given. The more he is captured by this love, the more he sees the truth that this love does not originate in him [mi-nafsho]. That is, the more he loves the more he becomes [existentially] aware of his own impotence. He sees that it is the spirit of God that speaks in him, even constituting the very words of his mouth. He sees that this love [he feels] is from the great fire of divinity [within him]. The more he gives himself over to it the stronger it becomes.

The equation underlying this comment may be summed up as follows: human beings who are only acting as independent volitional agents will always see their actions as sovereign and, perhaps unwittingly, deny the latent divine source in themselves. They cannot express agape nor be ethical, according to Menahem Mendel, because divine love is born in the recesses of the human soul, a love that is given from above to activate, reside in, and become a part of the human being. At best, such an individual can only engage in self-love. Maximus the Confessor argued that self-love “hardens the heart which possesses everyone and through this quality . . . sets nature against itself.”27 Beginning with the premise that human beings contain a divine nature, acting as sovereign in fact creates dualism by setting “nature against itself.” Therefore, in order to love as God loves and as humans can love and to act ethically, one must become “filled with God,” or perhaps fashion oneself as being a station of divine presence. Being filled with God does not require the effacement of the self but only the disclosure of the self by acknowledging a divine source of the self that self-love denies. Incarnation is about becoming fully human.

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The problem is that this line of thought ignores the explicit attachment to a Platonic framework that categorically distinguishes between the self and God. “The more he is captured by this love, the more he sees the truth that this love does not originate in him [mi-nafsho]. That is, the more he loves the more he becomes [existentially] aware of his own impotence.” The phrase “does not originate in him” implies that he becomes no more than a vessel for the divine by emptying himself of his own humanness or, emptying himself of himself. Hasidism never totally broke free of its Neoplatonic moorings, which may be one reason it was able to deflect the heretical claims against it. However, I suggest that the previous quote above, while not abandoning Neoplatonic dualism, stretches the framework to its limits. Perhaps it is left to the modern readers of Hasidism to take this Hasidic unsuccessful attempt to distance itself from dualism where it simply could not go.28 The self that is now the residence for the divine is not empty of humanness but rather a new kind of human being, or in Christian terms a new Adam. More importantly the person is now more human because he or she is more divine. Being “more human” is expressed in the ability to love others and desire to do so. This revealed humanness may be likened to the Christian notion of the incarnation whereby Jesus is both “fully God and truly human.” While not precisely the same as the dual nature of Christ, this text pushes Menahem Mendel’s own dualistic framework to the limit. Hasidism, still operating in the medieval categories that maintained the duality between the soul (as divine) and the body (as material), began deconstructing these categories when it was suggested that the one “incarnate” with God did not transcend his humanness but rather fully disclosed it, expressing it in divine/human love toward the other. This person could now love not as God loves but as humans should love. This viewpoint becomes clear from a creative rendering of a midrashic passage. In describing the simultaneity of God’s transcendence and immanence, the Midrash states that “God is the place of the world but the world is not his place.”29 Half of this phrase is used here, in one variant subtly substituting “world” for “humankind.”30 That is, God’s true residence in this world is in the human being.31 Being fully human is being a residence for the divine. For ­Menahem Mendel this required the dissolution of volition, here understood not as the full expression of humanity but the stunted expression of humanity that denies its divine source. Eastern Orthodoxy expresses this in a way Menahem Mendel might find appealing: “Love is freedom, but it is also the

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transcendence of autonomy.”32 The transcendence is not denial as much as a unification of the divine self with the human will. Autonomy here is meant to imply denial of the incarnate self. The experience of radical indwelling, which, if these texts are not taken simply as metaphor, crosses over from the normative notion of the human as created in the image of God (b’zelem elohim) into an incarnational register, has two immediate consequences. First, the human impotence that was merely posited earlier is experientially affirmed; second and more importantly, it enables the individual to express divine love, the only love Menahem Mendel would hold as authentic. This [expression of] love results in connecting him to all creatures (ba-ey olam) and all human beings33 after realizing that this love is a love of grace that he did not merit in his own soul. This is because it is impossible to create or merit this divinity. It is the will of God that it is given as a gift. If he gives this gift of love to another, his friend would be similarly inspired. And his friend would realize that this gift is not from him [but from God]. The proof of this is that when this love is removed he becomes like everyman [that is, those who are not righteous], sometimes on the mark and sometimes missing the mark, as it says, “like the arrow that flies by day” [Ps. 91:5]. His thoughts are like the thoughts of every righteous person. When he embodies a particular posture [either existentially or actively] he identifies with the person that shares that desire. In this way [when he once again embodies this divine love], he will always love all of Israel, even transgressors [rishei Yisrael], because he knows and understands [from his experience of humanness] that they are close to him. Therefore, he identifies with them. He realizes that he is one of them [ke-ehad ha-am] and has no advantage over them, save the [gift of the ability to love] that he receives from heaven. When he acts on this divine love he elevates all those he encounters because the traits he shares with them result in a unity between him and any other. He becomes one soul with them in every aspect. In this way he connects to the myriad of individuals and elevates them [through this divine love].

This experience, with an incarnational resonance, enables one to love all human beings because he sees how all humans, even those that are evil (that is, transgressors), share his divine source. In some sense Menahem Mendel has come full circle and ends up at the Sermon on the Mount. The difference between one who is full of God and a transgressor is that the latter has not yet

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opened himself up to the experience of incarnation and is thus still acting independent of God (or his own latent divinity). Or perhaps the one incarnate with divinity has recognized his full human potential as divine and is thus able to see the divine in the other. One’s ability to elevate those souls is equal to one’s ability to love, for love, as divine, is that which elevates (elevation here being the act that reunites a thing with its source). This ability is not procured simply by following the law. In fact the law presents certain challenges to this ideal because practitioners can easily err in seeing themselves as autonomous agents. This is not the case with one who envisions himself as having the autonomy and strength to study and fulfill the entire Torah. This person is considered as one who hates Jews and “it is as if he has no God” [b.T. Avodah Zara, 17b]. He is surely worse than all the transgressors “like a troubled sea” [Isa. 57:20].34 This person empowers the demonic forces more than all transgressors and descends to the greatest depths. This individual is a “querulous man” [Prov. 18:8 and 26:22] who “alienates his neighbor” [Prov. 17:9]. He severs the trait of fear, which is the divine presence (shekhina) from all of life by saying, “This is not divine but the work of my hands.” Thus Hillel the Sage, who surely was a very humble man, said, “If I [ani] am here everything is here” [b.T. Sukkah 53a]. That is, in every place Hillel finds himself, he finds all of humankind, [because he realizes that] he is like one of them and it is only God who is his redeemer. When he ascends, they all ascend with him.35

This admonishment of autonomous righteousness is quite stark and uncharacteristically framed around the practitioner of Torah and mitzvot.36 Why is this righteousness (“fulfilling the entire Torah”) worse than transgression, and why is such a person one “who hates Jews” and “one who has no God”? The basis of these comments was taken from the conventional kabbalistic idea that the demonic is empowered by utilizing the holy (Torah and mitzvot).37 Autonomous righteousness can only be false (and thus demonic) because, as autonomous (that is, without God or the recognition of the divine nature in/ of the self), it cannot be based on love. Such a person “hates Jews” because the Torah he lives is an expression of Torah without love, love only being possible through incarnation. And a Torah without love does not result in elevation (of the self or another) but descent (“and [he] descends to the greatest depths”). Menahem Mendel seems to be saying that hatred is a pre-incarnate human trait, perhaps subtly invoking Genesis 6:5 (“The Lord saw how great was the

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human’s wickedness on earth, and that every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time”), whereas only the divine/human can love.38 In order for a human being to love, he must become an incarnation of divinity, or at least be overcome with his or her own innate divinity. A creative rendering of the rabbinic passage, “it is as if he has no God” (ayn lo eloha) supports this reading. The full reference to b.T. Avodah Zara 17b, not given in the text, is relevant here. The Talmud states that for one who engages “only in Torah” without works of kindness ( gemilut hasadim) “it is as if he has no God.” Menahem Mendel subtly changed the locution by shifting the term eloha from a noun (God) to an adjective (godliness). The passage now read, “This is not the case with one who envisions himself as having the autonomy and strength to study and fulfill the entire Torah. This person is considered as one who hates Jews and ‘it is as if he has no godliness [ayn lo eloha].’” Or alternatively, “it is as if he is not in touch with his divinity”—more literally, “it is as if he has no divinity.” The talmudic passage uses this phrase as a condemnation of atheism—that Torah without acts of kindness, or Torah without ethics, is tantamount to atheism, even if it appears that the practitioner is a believer, since no true believer could act in such a manner. By changing the emphasis of the talmudic phrase from an accusation of atheism (one who does not believe in God) to a lack of divinity within (one who does not recognize his own divinity), but keeping its context, that is, speaking about the absence of ethics ( gemilut hasadim), Menahem Mendel essentially created a proof-text for his notion of incarnational ethical devotion. Hillel’s phrase was also twisted to support this unconventional claim. As rendered by Menahem Mendel, Hillel’s assertion was that the consequence of incarnation is the ability to maintain a state of absolute impotence, viewing every­thing from a divine perspective. Impotence is empowering in that it creates the capacity to love, and love is elevating insofar as love—agape—will recognize the divine in others (even those divine only in potentia, that is, transgressors). If one is not filled with God (as the newly disclosed human self) the Torah one fulfills falls into the hands of the demonic forces who undermine Israel and the covenant by making righteousness out of hatred (“This person is considered as one who hates Jews”). This is made explicit in the next section of the text: This is the general principle. One who serves God in this way [as divine incarnate] can only love and elevates everyone with him [with that love]. Conversely, it is clear that the righteousness of one who hates, even if he hates transgressors,

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is the result of self-promoting arrogance. This individual is “deceitful above all things” [Jer. 17:9].

Having established an incarnational ethics whereby love is dependent on the realization of one’s inner divinity, Menahem Mendel turned back to the question of how that posture is cultivated: One must [always] contemplate who is to be feared. It is God, who fills all possible worlds, without whom nothing exists. What is the source of my existence? It is God. Where I am destined to go? Toward God. If that is so, what am I? There is no fear except the fear of God’s glory. When one achieves this fear he will comprehend that it is also created by God and contains divine effluence, without which it would not exist. If one draws down this fear of God from its lofty place it will become compacted [in human experience] as love because any divine life force that is drawn down and implanted in this world is love. This will evoke love of God, resulting in “the descent of a thread of grace from the source of blessing” [b.T. Hagigah 12b]. From there, “you will be like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters do not fail” [Isa. 58:11].

How do we answer Menahem Mendel’s question, “Who am I”? First, I am nothing without recognizing the divinity within me (“What is the source of my existence? It is God.”). Second, by realizing the deficiency of the I as exclusively my sovereign will, I disclose the divinity of the self. “Who am I?” I am God’s residence on earth, which enables me to love others whose divinity I recognize. But the divinity that I house resides not outside me but is an integral part of my self. Love was the basis of ethics for Menahem Mendel because only love begets love, resulting in an interhuman (ethical) world that is really a divine/divine world. This is the way he understands the divine/human realm. The more conventional notion of a divine image embedded in a human body was not sufficient for Menahem Mendel’s divine love. The raw humanness of any individual (the autonomous self) cannot love, only hate, hatred defined here as the result of the non-recognition of the divinity of the other. The power of human volition suppresses the divine self, Menahem Mendel argues, first in the self and subsequently in the other, because the divine spark of the other is only realized through the divinity of the self. To love is to be (fully) God-like and simultaneously fully human, for only then can the divine in others be recognized. To be Godlike is to be full of God, who becomes the fully disclosed self (empty of its sovereign will); it is to be incarnate.

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III

In the texts of Kedushat Levi, Levi Isaac of Berdichev utilizes ethics in a different way from his contemporary, Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk. Kedushat Levi (“The Holiness of Levi”), Levi Isaac’s collected teachings, is a classic and remains one of the most widely read Hasidic texts from that period.39 In the texts examined below, ethics is treated as universal in nature, not tied to Sinai, and a true path to God. But Levi Isaac also viewed the source of ethics for Jews in the revelation, while for non-Jews (those who did not witness Sinai) ethics was humanly determined, though thereby no less deficient in substance. Levi Isaac’s “universalism” comes closest to David Novak’s ethical theory on the question of the universal. That is, for both Levi Isaac and Novak, ethics is universal (or, in Novak’s language, a product of natural law) but for Jews that universal law was framed through the particularity of the covenant (and thus became halakha). This is because “Jewish ethics is the particularistic expression of the universal and must be validated through that particularistic lens.”40 Levi Isaac, however, gave some license to interpret him as going a bit further than Novak. He suggested that the ethical can serve as the nexus where Jews and non-Jews meet, perhaps on equal ground, thereby problematizing the particularity of the covenant as normatively construed. While not fully obliterating Israel’s particular relationship with God, ethics widens the covenant to create what Levi Isaac called “one people” (am ehad). He remained unclear, however, (and this is decisive) about the consequences of what he calls “one people,” but the term itself at least points to ambivalence about any claim of uniqueness regarding Jewish ethics. This whole discussion was framed around a talmudic dictum concerning conversion. What is accomplished by conversion? Why should a person undergo conversion? What does he or she come to realize through the process of conversion? And finally, what impact does conversion have on the religion to which one coverts? Levi Isaac began this passage by reframing the relationship between the ­divine/human and interhuman realm first suggested in the Talmud. He argued for an ethics built on the foundation of unity—first the unity of God and second the unity of humanity (or, at least, the community that recognizes divine unity). The covenant and its ethical expression is an outgrowth of that dual unity. The first unity creates the possibility for the second; the second serves as the earthly embodiment of the first. The surprising end to this approach is that the transference from the divine to the collective results in the universalization of the covenant. While one could argue this essentially means the Judaization of the

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world, it can also be read to mean the very erasure of the notion of Jew, at least as “Jew” is defined as a distinct entity created through a particular covenant.41 Any community that recognizes the unity of God (first communicated at Sinai) and sees that unity reflected in the human community (ethics) becomes part of the covenant with the unified God. In this sense, the particularism of divine election is deconstructed through ethics. Levi Isaac began by juxtaposing two seemingly contradictory passages in the Talmud: On the rabbinic dictum “[the aspiring convert asked Hillel the Sage] ‘Teach me all of the Torah on one foot.’ Hillel the Sage teaches: ‘what you would hate another to do to you, do not do to him.’”42 Other rabbinic sages taught that the first commandment “I am the Lord your God” and “Do not have any other gods before me” were both heard from the mouth of God [m’pi ha-gevurah].43 [This meant that] the entire Torah was included in them. That is, all its reasons and secret hints were included in the notion of the divine unity [ahdut ha-Shem] [as expressed in those two commandments]. All the reasons were hinted at [in these two commandments] in order that we recognize them when we bind ourselves and serve the Creator. So it is that all the esoteric teachings teach that all the mitzvot only serve to teach us of the unity of God.44

Given the opportunity to “teach the entire Torah on one foot,” Hillel cited a negative version of “Love your neighbor as yourself ” (Lev. 19:18), one of the standard biblical verses employed to define Jewish ethics.45 Levi Isaac continued, however, that we have another talmudic dictum that states that the entire Torah was communicated and is embodied in the first two commandments, referring to the doctrine of divine unity [ahdut ha-Shem]. If this is so, why didn’t Hillel cite these two commandments and their interpretation to the aspiring convert?46 Levi Isaac answered by interpreting the talmudic distinction of divine/human and interhuman mitzvot. It is widely known that the mitzvot of the Torah are divided into two distinct categories. The first is mitzvot between Israel and its Father in Heaven, such as ritual fringes [zizit], phylacteries [tefillin], and sacrifices [korbanot]. The other category is interhuman mitzvot, expressed in “Love your neighbor as yourself ” (Lev. 19:18). “Rabbi Akiba says, this [“Love your neighbor . . .”] is the great principle of the Torah.”47 We must understand that interhuman mitzvot are included

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in the principle of divine unity, as we said “I am the Lord Your God” and “Do not have any other gods . . .” were heard directly from the mouth of God and encompass the entire Torah.48 The entire congregation of Israel [at Sinai] believed that one God revealed this [lit. explained this to us]. Israel, when they stand unified, is called Knesset Israel, Knesset Israel being the shekhina [the cosmic divine presence]. When Israel stands as one, when one feels pain, his neighbor feels pain. This is like a human being—when one limb is stricken with pain the entire body is affected by that pain. Since the one unified God created us, and Israel comes to meet that God as one unit, the pain of one is felt by all.49

The foundation of ethics presented here (Hillel’s remark) was the result of the transference of the divine unity realized at Sinai to the unity of Israel as one body. When Levi Isaac wrote, “we must understand that interhuman mitzvot are included in the principle of divine unity” he meant that the interhuman, as Hillel framed it, is only possible by first realizing divine unity through the first two commandments (Sinai). The consequence of realizing that unity is the realization of the unity of the community as one body. We act ethically toward our neighbor (here only our Israelite neighbor) because we identify with him or her as part of the unified self that is forged at Sinai (hearing the first two commandments).50 The covenant with God fostered through the recognition of divine unity is the basis of the covenant with human beings brought about through the realization that any community that recognizes divine unity is “a community that stands as one.” This principle [of unity, divine and human] encapsulates all the interhuman mitzvot. It is also the case that interhuman mitzvot are part of the unity of God. Since Israel believes that one unified God created them, and that they are also one unit, it is fit to work for the betterment of one’s neighbor and to prevent the distress of one’s fellow man.

Up to this point Levi Isaac supported the normative idea that covenant and divine election underlie the foundation of Jewish ethics. That is, that “love your neighbor,” as interpreted by the rabbis, refers only to the Israelite neighbor— Israel defined as that collective and their progeny who share, either directly or by proxy, the historical experience of Sinai (ahdut ha-Shem). This is necessary because only Israel, who heard the first two commandments, had a notion of the community as a unified body that made religious ethics possible.

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Levi Isaac did not stop here, however. He was curious about why the rabbinic discussion of Hillel’s declaration of Jewish ethics was framed in a conversation with an aspiring convert. Turning from Hillel’s answer to the underlying premise of the convert’s question, Levi Isaac problematized the very notion that election, and thus ethics (“love your neighbor”) was limited to the original community at Sinai. This is what the aspiring convert asked when he said, “Teach me the entire Torah on one foot.” That is, teach me how all the mitzvot, even interhuman mitzvot, are founded on the unity of God. The convert said, “I want to convert, that is, I want to understand how even interhuman mitzvot are part of divine unity. At that point I can convert and serve the unique God, because when I understand this I will know that Israel’s civil laws [mishpatim] cannot be known and have no natural reason. Even concerning very tangible civil laws [mishpatei ­ha-arez], what is imperative is that their end is to know the unity and uniqueness of God.” Hillel responded [to that query] by saying that since the unified God created Torah and us [Israel] we [entered into a covenant with Him] as one, all of Israel feels the anguish and joy of his [Israelite] neighbor. Therefore, even interhuman mitzvot are rooted in the unity of God. Religious laws [mishpatim] have no rational [or natural] meaning. Even political and civil laws have no meaning except that one must serve the One God and come to understand His uniqueness. Therefore, all the nations [ha-amim] must become one nation [am ehad]. This will result in the transformation of all nations to a nation of God. “All the many nations will go and say to the House of Jacob, ‘Let us go in the light of God, and walk in His ways forever’” (Isa. 2:3 and 2:5).

The aspiring convert in this text wants to know how interhuman relations (ethics) are connected to divine/human relations. He knew that one need not be Jewish to be ethical or to serve God. Being Jewish here is defined solely as understanding the dependence of ethics on divine unity (ahdut ha-Shem). ­According to Levi Isaac’s reading, the convert in this talmudic passage serves as a metaphor for those civilizations that did not experience the historical bene­ ficence of the Sinai covenant but desired to understand how ethics relates to depiction of that Sinaitic God without the benefit of the historical experience. Hillel’s answer was that ethics is born out of a realization of the unity of the human community that emerges out of the Sinaitic revelation (the unity of God). That is, ethics results from the transference of divine unity to humankind, which is born of a particular collective human experience of God. While

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Sinai provided this for Israel, however, the realization of divine unity can also be cultivated in reverse, that is, by first realizing the unity of the human community and, by extension, the unity of God. This seems to have been Levi Isaac’s idea of conversion. Instead of conversion simply being the ability of others to share in the historical covenant of Israel, Levi Isaac suggested that conversion, in an expansive sense, is the deconstruction of the particularistic nature of divine election—or the substitution (but perhaps not erasure) of the historical for the universal. “Therefore, all the people [ha-amim] must become one people [am ehad].” This most likely refers to Israel as well. It is a creative play on the prophetic declaration that “in that day, the Lord will be One and His Name will be one” (Zech. 14:9). Universal recognition of divine unity, and universal religion, is realized by the recognition of the unity of humankind, the place where the historical meets and is subsumed in the universal. “This will result in the transformation of all nations to a nation of God.” Becoming one nation through ethics results in the universal realization of divine unity and the completion of the Israelite mission to the world. That is apparently why Hillel responded to the convert with “love your neighbor” (the universal) and did not bring up the first two commandments (the historical). Those commandments only work for those who heard them directly from God (Israel). For those at Sinai, the experience and completion of divine unity must have translated into ethics via the transference of divine unity to the unity of the community. For those not at Sinai, however, the way to that unity began in ethics culminating in the transference of humankind’s unity to divine unity. When the non-Israelite community realized this connection, that is, when they heeded Hillel’s advice, they met the Israelites and became one people (am ehad). This realization need not have been the product of the experience of revelation (and subsequent tradition) but could come about through human inquisitiveness (the aspiring convert) and Hillel’s response to the convert’s question (love your neighbor). Both communities met and became am ehad via living the ethical ideal as one community—they just began from opposite places.

IV This chapter addresses two separate but connected issues. The first is the extent to which Hasidism harbors a theory of incarnational thinking. That is, how Hasid­ism, through these limited examples, conceives of the human as an indwelling of the divine in a way that exceeds the conventional biblical and rab-

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binic notion (that is, the human is created in the “image of God”).51 This is not to claim that the Hasidic notion of incarnation is identical to that of Christology. This is surely not the case. Rather, it is to explore only the limited claim that Hasidic spirituality carries an attenuated incarnational theology that can enter into dialogue with certain forms of Christianity. The second set of questions regards the place of Hasidism in the discourse of Jewish ethics; specifically, does Hasidism have anything innovative to offer in a discussion of Jewish ethics? I argued above that Hasidism’s contribution might be its incarnational thinking, that its belief in the ability to imagine the divine in the other and then subsequently in the self expresses an incarnational model that can be deployed to posit a theory about human relations founded on the proximity of the human and God within the human self. This is the foundation of one form of Hasidic ethics, an ethical stance that is founded and functions outside the law (halakha). The expansive notion of incarnation in this book draws heavily from Eastern Orthodox Christianity, specifically the way that faith conceives of ethics as love and love as fulfilled through the event of the divine becoming human in Jesus of Nazareth.52 In Eastern Orthodoxy the event of Incarnation makes possible the incarnation of divine love in the human, such that divine love (agape) is a vehicle for divine/human love of another.53 And, that this expression of love is the essence of the ethical.54 The notion of theosis, or divine/human similitude, is viewed as possible for all because it occurred at one time. “Incarnation also presents the theanthropic vocation as a new moral imperative. . . . Clement of Alexandria undoubtedly had this in mind when he wrote in the Propteptikos, ‘The Word of God became man that you also may learn from a man how man becomes God.’”55 The instantiation of divine/human similitude now becomes possible, and should be the goal, for all human endeavors. This was summarized nicely in the following way: After the incarnation, God is united to humankind through the sacrament of the Eucharist and is manifested as light within one’s inner being. . . . This interpretation of the theory of the uncreated light can be found not only among the ­hesychast monks, but more generally, in the teaching of the Orthodox church regarding the renewal and theosis (deification) of humanity. By participating in the uncreated grace or energy of God, humankind itself becomes a god by grace.”56

This notion of human deification does not mean that there ceases to be any distinction between humans and the divine through theosis. It does mean, however, that in the Incarnation, Jesus contains within himself “the fullness

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of divinity” while we only receive “from that fullness” because Jesus’s fullness has become manifest in the world.57 Stripped of its particular Christian terminology and imagery, this language exhibits sentiments similar to the Hasidic texts examined earlier regarding the indwelling of divinity in the human being, without a belief in the full, one-time disclosure of God and the erasure of any distinction between the divine and the human. In the Hasidic texts ethical behavior emerges from the recognition of divine selfhood and, subsequently, the divinity of the other. It challenges the exclusivity of the law as the sole arbiter of Jewish devotional life. Judaism does not have a formal doctrine of incarnation on which to base this idea, but it arises in Hasidism from a combination of factors: its deep engagement with embodiment in medieval Kabbalah, its (re)focus on the charismatic person articulated as zaddikism, and its development outside the Christian gaze and not having to differentiate Judaism from Christianity in an apologetic manner. In normative Judaism the law (halakha) is predicated on the assumption of absolute difference between the human and the divine. The divine gives the law but is not bound by it; the human obeys the law and only thereby is covenanted.58 A human being who is also divine (for example, Jesus) is not bound by the law because he embodies the reconciliation that the law seeks to achieve in its final disclosure. This is one way of reading Paul.59 Law functions in Rabbinic Judaism in an exilic paradigm based on the premise of irreconcilable distance between the lawgiver and the one who receives and performs it. In this way the obligatory nature of the law is permanent, even, some argue, in the messianic era.60 Law serves to bring these two parties closer together through covenant. In the following pages I pose the question of the ethical, not law more generally. That is, I ask whether ethical action is mandated—is it, can it be, or must it be, part of the law? “Ethics” is used here in a specific way that pertains to the Hasidic texts under examination and based on the Eastern Orthodox conception of the ethical as love and a stage toward theosis. In modern discourse when ethics is mentioned it is often thought of as constituting certain actions or behavior that either do or do not conform to predetermined principles. But how are these criteria set? An instance in classic Jewish literature is Moses Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters,” which is devoted to describing Aristotle’s ethical mean in terms of virtue and vice. Ethical norms are constructed of a combination of Aristotelian rationalism and scriptural and rabbinic proof-texts. The Maimonidean assumption, very much in line with medieval philosophical symmetry between faith and

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reason, is that rationalism is a tool to expose the “true” philosophical principles that are embedded in a seemingly unphilosophical Scripture.61 Resisting the polarities of faith and reason, Hasidism largely functions outside this medieval philosophical paradigm. As in Eastern Orthodoxy, the Hasidic texts focus on an ethical disposition rather than practice, that is, the cultivation of a particular sensibility founded on divine love transformed into human love. It is less behaviorist and more existential in its orientation. On Eastern Orthodox ethics Vigen Guroian writes, “An Orthodox ethic does not rely on a utilitarian calculus or on formal or conscientious adherence to rules and a dispensing of duties. Rather, it is concerned primarily with the realization of love, righteousness, and divine similitude in persons and social institutions.”62 Elsewhere he suggests that, as opposed to Protestantism (and much of modern Judaism), Eastern Orthodoxy rejects any distinction between worship or theology and ethics.63 This sentiment also embodies the Hasidic spirit. Bound to the classical tradition inherited largely from pre-modern rabbinic and kabbalistic sources, Hasidism engages in loose forms of virtue ethics, but rather its general inclination is not toward the practical notion of virtue and vice but the dispositional notion of love as the vehicle for relating to an “other.” One illustration of this can be found in Joseph Dan’s comment that “for Hasidism, religion and ethics were one and the same, and ethical expression encompassed the totality of their world-view.”64 Guroian offers a similar description: “The vision of Orthodox ethics makes no sharp distinction between the activity of worship and morality.”65 That is, for both Hasidism and Eastern Orthodoxy ethics is not virtue-centered but the product of a disposition. “To be ethical is not to do good acts but to participate in the divine life.”66 For both traditions ethics is indistinguishable from worship or devotion and is based on the extent to which the human can embody and express divine love. For both, but in different ways, ethics is embodied in the theanthropic being. For Christianity this is possible owing to the Incarnation, in which the divine and the human meet. The roots in Hasidism are far less clear, but if it is agreed that ethics grows out of love (which is divine in origin), in order for the human first to embody divine love there must be some theory of incarnation or incarnational thinking. It is often argued that Judaism and incarnationalism are incompatible. I have argued here that the story is more complex.67 Divine embodiment, even in a human being, has roots in ancient Judaism and is both historically and philosophically consistent with the way the Jewish religion has evolved.68 Michael Wyschogrod notes that “it must be emphasized that the Jewish objection to an

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incarnational theology cannot be based on a priori grounds, as if something in the nature of the Jewish concept of God made his appearance in the form of humanity a rational impossibility.”69 In rabbinic literature, divine indwelling (a term not identical to but also not absolutely distinct from incarnation) is manifest most prominently in the realms of physical space (the Temple), history, the collective body of Israel (Knesset Israel), the holiness of Jerusalem (or the entirety of the Land of Israel) and perennial providence (hashgaha peratit). Indwelling also includes cosmic and metaphorical representations of God in human form, for example, God performing mitzvot in Heaven and experiencing the plethora of human emotions.70 The divinity of Torah, or Torah as the embodiment of God, and the indwelling of God among those who study Torah is yet another example where Judaism quite easily acknowledges divine presence within its basic aniconic worldview.71 Elliot Wolfson has shown that in certain medieval mystical formulations, specifically those about prayer, rabbinic “indwelling” passes over into incarnational thinking.72 In the texts Wolfson treats, God is envisioned as human, and by extension the human is fashioned as divine. This constitutes a kind of inversion of Christian incarnation, but incarnation nonetheless, in this case the human form becomes a cosmic divine body in the human imagination. I am arguing that incarnational thinking as an idea, when detached but not wholly severed from its historical and theological roots in Christianity—the one-time mysterious embodiment of God in Jesus of Nazareth (John 1:45, 46)— is not antithetical to Judaism. Incarnational thinking in Judaism must point to a broader notion that the boundaries between the human and the divine are permeable and the absolute distinction separating the human and the divine (an idea that is arguably fundamental to halakha) cannot survive that permeability. That is, while there may be a distinction between being God and being with God or being a residence for God, the latter two are sufficient aspects of ­incarnational thinking. Or, being God is not a necessary condition to speak of incarnation as opposed to indwelling, although it surely is in John and Christianity.73 The Hasidic texts in question suggest an approach to ethics founded on this principle of permeability whereby the individual realizes his or her own divinity and subsequently the divinity of the other, thereby disentangling ethics from the law.74 This realization is achieved through the practice of self­emptying, whereby individuals are able to bracket their “material” humanness to disclose their innate divine humanity. In fact Paul used the image of emptying as an attribute of God to be emulated as an ethical precept. “Have this

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mind among yourselves, which you have in Jesus Christ who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:5–7).75 In Eastern Orthodoxy self-emptying is also an act of love, not only a preparation for it, “bringing into existence an other toward whom this love may be directed and in whom might be engendered a loving response.”76 The Hasidic texts taught about emptying the humanness (or nondivine humanness) to reveal God (within?). Paul taught this precept through the example of the incarnate God who empties himself of divinity to become human (yet remain divine). Yet we know that God’s self-emptying does not “empty” the divine, because the Incarnation doctrine holds that Jesus is simultaneously divine and human. The dual nature of Jesus was rejected as heresy by some. So too, self-emptying in Hasidism does not need to be interpreted in the Neoplatonic language of two incompatible natures (the human and the divine) but it can be viewed as an act of disclosure of the fully human, creating the conditions for love or agape that is simultaneously divine and human, or the expression of divinity through the human.

x If classical Judaism does not affirm this description of incarnation, one might well ask why it is appropriate to use the weighty term “incarnational” to describe the Jewish texts.77 This idea, when employed as a theoretical construct (divine embodiment fulfilled) and not a one-time mysterious event, has a significance in the Jewish mystical tradition that transcends the more conventional notion of indwelling of embodiment.78 This Hasidic turn may also inform the extent to which the Christian notion is born out of ancient Jewish mystical sources, thus opening new avenues for inter-religious exploration.79 In both Judaism and Christianity, divine embodiment or incarnation in human beings is based on the biblical notion of humans created in the divine image or zelem elohim (Gen. 1:27).80 The Hasidic texts under consideration suggest a hyperliteral interpretation of zelem elohim, humans as “the image of God,” in distinction to the way the biblical idea has been interpreted metaphorically or heuristically.81 While Judaism does not conventionally use the language of incarnation in discussing humans created in “the image of God” (it does use correlated terms such as “embodiment” and “indwelling” [shekhina] when referring to God’s residence in the material plane),82 the Hasidic texts point decidedly in the incarnational direction.83

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In classical Judaism divine indwelling signified that God takes up temporary residence in the world but His presence does not transform the physical into something divine. There is disagreement as to whether God’s residence is temporary or permanent, that is, whether His residence in Erez Israel, Zion,84 the Temple,85 or Israel the people is contingent upon Israel’s behavior or a permanent part of its “body.”86 Its practical application is largely one of s­ acrality, denoting specific ways in which these “embodied” physical objects should be treated. Regarding the human as zelem elohim, the sages understood this largely as the way the Bible distinguishes between the human and other creatures.87 It has not generally been interpreted as a suggestion of the divinity of the human.88 By contrast, in the Hasidic texts, humans were so overcome with their own divinity that their very humanness disappeared, or was emptied, disclosing a fully realized divine core.89 While the physical body remains (as it does in Jesus), the individual’s perspective on selfhood is transformed (with Jesus it is also his disciples’ perception of him). This idea extends beyond the conventional Jewish notion of “indwelling.”90 Buber alluded to this when he wrote, “In the measure in which the fire of God shining above men in infinite distance and majesty is enkindled in the innermost chambers of the self, thus, in the measure in which the ‘divine image’ becomes concrete reality the difference between autonomy and heteronomy is dissolved in a higher unity within the community living in the living certitude of the tradition [my emphasis].”91 The “concrete reality of the divine image” Buber mentions gestures towards the incarnational thinking I am suggesting.

V Judaism is built on the foundation of a covenant, a reciprocal relationship between God and the Israelite people, either historical or mythological, forged in the Sinai desert (Exod. 19–21). The fulcrum of the covenant is a system of mitzvot, commandments the Israelites and their descendants are obliged to fulfill, thereby executing their covenantal relationship to God. In the Bible these mitzvot comprise both ritual and ethical acts without an inherent distinction between divine/human and interhuman commandments. In classical Judaism the sages of the Talmud were the first to distinguish between divine/human and interhuman mitzvot.92 In the rabbinic mind, however, this distinction did not result in ethics as an independent category of mitzvot. Ethical mitzvot (inter­ human commandments) were still viewed within the larger framework of Israel’s covenantal relationship to God (divine/human commandments).93

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In the Middle Ages, Jews began to rethink this distinction in light of exposure to other ethical systems. Moses Maimonides, for example, built his Jewish ethical theory on the golden mean of Aristotle reread through the lens of classical Jewish sources, but still did not posit ethics as a sovereign realm of Jewish discourse.94 For Maimonides, ethics, even as it is rationally justified and philosophically constructed, was still always intertwined with Israel’s covenantal relationship to God, resulting inter alia in a particularized hierarchy whereby ethics was defined differently between Jew and Jew and Jew and g­ entile.95 While certainly more universal than the rabbis, Maimonides’ philosophical ethics still did not break out of the rabbinic model that tied ethics to the divine/human realm.96 In Maimonides’ system, Israel’s responsibility toward the “other” [that is, the gentile] was determined by the covenantal obligation toward God forged at Sinai. There was no ontology of ethics nor any true autonomy in the Kantian sense. Acting toward the other was still an instance of fulfilling one’s obligation to God. The question as to the universal nature and implementation of Jewish ethics and the formulation of ethics as independent of human devotion to God (that is, severing the dependence of interhuman relations to divine/human relations) is thus a product of modernity, specifically as formulated by Jewish writing influenced by the Enlightenment. Hasidic spirituality, built on the foundations of Jewish mysticism, disentangles ethics from the law by assuming that the law, while essential, cannot fully cultivate the ethical personality. This is not because Hasidism is universalistic in any way but because of its commitment to devekut as the telos, and origin, of Jewish worship (avodat ha-Shem). In Hasidism, at least as presented here, ethics is the outgrowth of a disposition that emerges from a distinct existential posture, resulting in an experience of the divinity in the self and the divinity of other individuals and of the community. In order to illustrate the contrast between this approach and the more normative notion of ethics as an outgrowth of the law, I briefly examine three contemporary essays on Jewish ethics.97 The first is by Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein entitled “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” Eugene Borowitz responds to Lichtenstein in “The Authority of the Ethical Impulse in ‘Halakha’.” The third essay is David Novak’s “Jewish Ethics and Natural Law,” a chapter from his book Natural Law in Judaism.98 In his seminal essay on Jewish ethics, Lichtenstein explores the notion of supererogatory behavior (lifnim me-shurat ha-din—“beyond the letter of the law”) in rabbinic and post-rabbinic legal literature to determine the extent to

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which supererogation is part of the law (halakha).99 He argues that if supererogation is shown to exist independent of the law (that is, not required or actionable), then the answer to the question as to whether Judaism accepts an ethic outside halakha would be affirmative. His conclusion is equivocal.100 He argues that lifnim me-shurat ha-din is surely not simply halakha (if it were, then it would not be lifnim [“beyond or inside”]). However, Lichtenstein continues, the sources indicate that supererogation is also not independent of the law. The rabbinic and post-rabbinic readings of biblical passages that refer to ethical behavior not tied to any specific mitzvah are absorbed into the larger halakhic system, occupying a special status in that system. For our purposes, the textual argument in Lichtenstein’s essay is less relevant than what may be the underlying worry that drives its conclusion. Lichten­ stein’s assertion that supererogation is a part of the law guards these biblical passages from being used to abrogate any part of the later halakhic system. It protects against pious antinomianism or a schism between biblical/­prophetic and rabbinic religion. Being a species of the halakhic system (a system constructed by the rabbinic sages), ethics as supererogation is only acceptable and viable when it conforms to, confirms, and supports halakha. External ethical norms and systems can work in tandem with halakha, helping to define the boundaries of supererogation, but they can never work against it. Lichtenstein’s acknowledgement that part of the law must lie “outside” normative halakha but is denied any power to alter the halakhic system is important in two respects. First, it tacitly confirms that formal law is, by itself, a necessary but insufficient condition to produce ethics. Second, it protects the halakhic system from any ethical critique that cannot be justified within tradition. The distinction between law and ethics is maintained, albeit in an attenuated way, while the destabilizing potential to wage an ethical critique against the law is diffused. This last point is precisely what Borowitz finds so problematic in Lichtenstein’s argument. Borowitz argues that by tying supererogation so intimately with halakha Lichtenstein prevents recipients of the “ethical impulse,” which the rabbis sought to cultivate in their readers, from scrutinizing the construction of the halakha itself. Borowitz argues that the ethical impulse that is so clearly a part of Rabbinic Judaism is stifled by Lichtenstein’s analysis and that, without so much as saying so, the rabbis wanted us to look outside the law in order to strengthen it. He brings the status of women in Judaism as an example. While he essentially agrees “historically” with those who argue that “the s­ o-called

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e­ thical impulse behind the women’s issue is a gentile importation into Judaism,” Borowitz suggests that the ethical “impulse” he believes so clearly to offer supralegal responses to ethical issues, even those born outside rabbinic discourse, is part of the spirit of Rabbinic Judaism’s concept of supererogation.101 On the question as to whether there is an ethic independent of halakha, Borowitz claims that there is an ethical impulse inside, and thus a part of, the halakha that may, at times, require us to look outside the halakha in order to resolve ethical issues that arise in the halakha. This is the case precisely with issues that arise as a result of our confrontation with other cultures and ethical systems. Novak takes this discussion in a different direction by stating, “if ‘ethics’ be defined prima facie as a system of rules governing interhuman relations, then ‘Jewish’ ethics is identified with Jewish law. It is Halakhah.”102 He quickly rejects that identification. For Novak the difference between ethics and law, and the independence of ethics from law, is that ethics is not about “rules” or “cases” (­halakha) but about principles that govern how rules are determined: “Whether the norm be scriptural or rabbinic, the role of ethics has come closest to being actually one of governance and not just guidance.”103 That is, ethics is a kind of ta’amei ha-mitzvot (“reasons for the commandments”) that determines the meaning of the law but is not determined by it. While ta’amei ha-mitzvot only arises from a system of law, it is not bound by the specifics of the law and can offer rationalizations of the commandments that address larger universal claims.104 Ta’amei ha-mitzvot consists of two major categories, the historical and the rational. The historical category determines laws (primarily ritual and communal) that are exclusive to those who share a particular historical experience (Jews). The universal rational category determines laws that have no historical basis but result from natural law. For Novak this is the category of Jewish ­ethics. “There can be no idea of natural law in Judaism unless there is an authentic Jewish ethics, part of which is not exclusive to Jews.”105 While establishing a modern category of Jewish ethics through natural law, independent of and even determining the law, Novak laments what he sees as the modern attempt to conflate ethics with Judaism, making ethics the dominant if not exclusive expression of the covenantal experience. This is because, he implies, ritualistic Judaism could not be integrated into Kant’s basic construction of ethics and ethical religion. According to Novak, the destructive nature of the modern conflation of Judaism and ethics—arguably the central project of modern liberal Judaism—is that it destroys the covenant as constituted by tradition and replaces it with another covenant in which God becomes

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simply a postulate that allows for ethical action to move society toward the ideal and in which mitzvot become a rational progressive system. That is, in equating Judaism with ethics, God becomes “incarnate” in the ethical ideal, fully realized and rationally (naturally) determined, leaving no unknowable covenantal partner with whom to relate. While this idea may be aligned with basic tenets of Christianity (incarnation and reconciliation), Novak claims it cannot be born out of Jewish sources.106 Novak argues that thus far Judaism traditionally construed cannot survive the Kantian and post-Kantian critique without rejecting the very premises of that critique. Novak suggests a postmodern alternative, a covenantal model in which the interhuman is reconstituted in the divine/human realm. This solution is an attempt to affirm positive religion (particularistic halakhic Judaism) while at the same time affirming the need for universalistic ethics within Judaism. That is, even if we view Jewish ethics through the lens of natural law, which is universal and independent of the law, its Jewishness is the particular way that natural law functions in the covenant, a relationship to God that is exclusive to Israel. What constitutes the ethical may be universal and not a product of any particular law, but what constitutes “Jewish ethics” is how that universal idea is reconstructed within the particular covenantal experience of Israel. Divine election and Jewish particularism cannot be renounced, even for the sake of a universal ethics.107 Still, universal ethics need not be sacrificed in order to maintain halakhic Judaism. The similarity of Novak to Levi Isaac on this point deserves some attention. In one sense Novak wants Jews to have it both ways. As a Jewish theologian Novak holds that ethics is an expression of natural law but maintains that Jewish ethics (which is a part of that natural law) is rooted in a particular event (Sinai) and is thus bound to the dictates of that event (the halakhic process). While he acknowledges that ethics as law must change and develop over time, it can only do so if it is in concert with the obligatory frame of the Sinai event (halakha). Ethics for the Jew is an expression of universal principles that are refracted through a particularistic lens. Did Levi Isaac go any further than that? It remains unclear. If we understand conversion in Levi Isaac’s text not as becoming Jewish in any conventional sense but coming to understand the divine source of interhuman behavior, can we posit that such a realization (which the Jews historically experienced at Sinai) erases the distinction between those present at Sinai (the Jew) and those not present (the gentile)? Or, does the historical event, even as its essential message is now universalized,

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remain determinate? As a philosopher and theologian, Novak realizes he must weigh in on that precise point, and he clearly does. As a Hasidic exegete, Levi Isaac remained ambiguous. In some sense it all rests on what Levi Isaac meant by “one people (am ehad).” Or, more precisely, how much can we read into his vision of one people? In any case, conversion not only changes the convert, it also changes the unique status of Israel’s covenant with God as it expands the essential message of Sinai (“love your neighbor, I am the Lord your God”) to one who was not there. Whether that change is normative, as in Novak, or radical, as it seems to be in Levi Isaac, remains unanswered. Hasidism does not have a word for ethics; it faithfully inherits the rabbinic and later pietistic traditions of the past.108 In this chapter, however, I have argued that Hasidism understands what we call ethics as an expression of an internal disposition that halakha alone cannot fully cultivate. While halakha may encourage such a disposition of piety—that is, it may have ethics as part of its goal—it does not formally (legally) require it. Moreover, the fulfillment of h ­ alakha, even in a supererogatory manner, may not always result in ethical behavior. This Hasidic rendering is very much a part of the larger discussion of Jewish ethics examined here through the work of Lichtenstein, Borowitz, and Novak. The disposition that the following Hasidic texts speak of is one of absorbing divinity, what I call incarnational thinking, allowing the divine to become so much a part of one’s being that one acts in the world as divine and subsequently treats the world (both the individual and the collective) as divine. Oddly enough, the question of halakha does not seem like an operative category to describe these Hasidic reflections of ethics, even as both Menahem Mendel and Levi Isaac remained bound by and committed to the halakhic system. Rather, both in different ways seemed more interested in the effacement of difference between the human (will) and the divine. This inclination was already noted by Buber in an essay on Hasidism. “In principle, to be sure, no problem of autonomy and heteronomy exists for him, for he knows that, if he were in full harmony with his God, then just that which is God’s will would take fire in his own heart, and there would be no distinction between ‘from that side’ and ‘from this side.’”109 At the same time, Buber viewed autonomy as the starting point of all ethics. “We find the ethical in its purity only there where the human person confronts himself with his own potentiality and distinguishes and decides in this confrontation without asking anything other than what is right and wrong in his own situation.”110 Autonomy for Buber,

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unlike autonomy for Kant, is only forged through relation, in particular relation with the Absolute (God) who while Buber acknowledges is silent, can be depicted as Person. “The real self appears only when it enters into relation with the Other. When this relation is rejected, the real ‘self ’ withers away.”111 I suggest that Buber did not go far enough in his Hasidic-influenced rendering of Jewish e­ thics. That is to say, given the Hasidic texts we have seen, it is not simply that the human will is aligned with the divine will but the human will, now emptied of its non-divine (human) otherness, is disclosed as divine. Moreover, relation between the person (human) and the Person (God) can occur within the “I” as the human discloser of the divinity of the self. This is not a mystical collapse of the “I” in a unitive experience but, in fact, the opposite, the emergence of the human, fully disclosed.

Conclusion This chapter began with a discussion of the viability of a “Jewish” ethics, as a preamble to make the case that Hasidism offers a different ethical perspective, one based on an incarnational sensibility that has more in common with Eastern Orthodox ethics than the conventional Jewish cases discussed in the second part of the chapter. The focus was on two early Hasidic masters—Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk and Levi Isaac of Berdichev—suggesting each articulated a construction of Hasidic ethics that was disentangled from halakha and more aligned with Eastern Orthodox notions of theosis. These Hasidic masters were deeply committed in theory and practice to the halakhic tradition, and they posited an ethics that was not bound by the very system they lived in. Menahem Mendel, for example, suggested that ethics is an outgrowth of divine love achieved through a kind of incarnation of the divine into the human vessel resulting in the “deification” and full disclosure of the human. The individual is now poised to express agape, which is viewed as the foundation of the ethical disposition. This love serves to elevate all of creation by evoking the divinity in one’s neighbor as a recipient of that love, that is, in receiving God’s grace. In this case, while the law (halakha) may indeed serve as an obligatory and necessary component for the Jew, the law does not produce or even cultivate this love; this love is achieved via supralegal, not merely supererogatory, means, through contemplation and the practice of emptying the self of the ego and will. Levi Isaac’s texts may be more relevant to the modern interpreters of ethics as he directly addressed the rabbinic dichotomy of divine/human and inter­ human mitzvot in addition to the universal reach of ethics. Yet he is also more

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problematic because he never disclosed how far we can take his seemingly provocative claim. Does conversion undermine covenantal particularity or does it merely enable the convert to have a share in a historical experience that is not, and can never be, his own? In short, one can claim that Levi Isaac subverted Jewish particularism through ethics and that he made it even more rigid by refusing to allow the convert to have any share in the historical experience at Sinai. I support the former reading. Instead of simply locating interhuman relations in divine/human relations, something that Novak claims is fundamental to classical Judaism and largely disappears in modern Jewish ethics, Levi Isaac presented interhuman relations for Israel (“love your neighbor”) as an outgrowth of divine/human relations (“I am the Lord your God”) but used that correlation to construct a universal message of Judaism that, if manifested successfully, deconstructs the particularistic formulation of divine election. That is, the interhuman moves beyond exclusivity to Israel and includes anyone who recognizes the unity of God, even as that unity is achieved through ethics (the universal) and not via Sinai (the historical). This offers a curiously literal and provocative rendering of the talmudic dictum, “Anyone who repudiates idolatry is called a Jew.”112 For the non-Israelite who did not partake in the historical covenant at Sinai and thus did not inherit the tradition, conversion happens when he or she comes to realize that divine/human relations are the source for interhuman relations (that is, Hillel’s answer to the convert in b.T. Shabbat 31a). Moreover, the success of this universal message to the convert is that Israel and the rest of humanity forge one world community (am ehad), all elected because they all recognize the unity of God and each feeling equally obligated to live ethically. While the historical roots of each community may remain distinct (an issue Levi Isaac never addressed and Novak affirms), the shared recognition of the unity of God creates a (universal?) ethics out of the transference of divine unity to the human community and vice versa. The question that Kant posed is engaged by Levi Isaac in one way, by Novak in another. The exclusive notion of covenant forged through history (Sinai) is problematized here. Part of the covenant (the historical) with Israel remains, but the rational, natural, or universal part is expanded to include all those who adhere to Hillel’s advice (“what you would hate another to do to you, do not do to him”). If so, what of the historical claim remains efficacious? That is, if the convert realizes the essential message of Sinai, at least according to Hillel, do the external demands of Sinai carry any particularistic weight aside from communal identity? This is an ethic “independent of halakha” because it applies to those who have

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no share in the historical roots of the halakhic system. In the case of  ­Menahem Mendel, an ethics nurtured by becoming sensitized to the divinity of the self (via an incarnational posture) and subsequently in the world disentangles Jewish ethics from the formalism and particularistic nature of the halakha. This chapter does not claim to offer a definitive understanding of Hasidic ethics. That would require a much more exhaustive study and would likely be impossible in any case. Instead I present an analysis of texts by two early Hasidic masters, arguing that they traverse the acceptable notion of divine indwelling to the more problematic notion of incarnational thinking. By extension, seen through the window of these texts, Hasidism offers a vision of ethics disentangled from the law precisely because the foundation of ethical behavior is not legal obligation but rather a realization of the divinity of the self and the other. Once disentangled from the law (even as these Hasidic masters remain bound to the law), Hasidism represented through these sets of texts can also address the question of the universal as the universal applies to ethical action, not in the liberal vein of “ethical monotheism” but as a transformation of self to divine-self and others as divine-others. Even the three contemporary thinkers (Lichtenstein, Borowitz, and Novak), each in his own way, wed “Jewish” ethics to the law. However revised or reconstructed, these Hasidic texts offer an alternative model of how the ethical personality is cultivated and nurtured in Judaism. By disentangling ethics from the law, Hasidism challenges some conventional notions about Judaism and modern Jewish ethics as envisioned both from within and without. In light of the larger thesis of this book, when traditional thinkers with deep roots in the normative and mystical tradition of Judaism contemplate an idea endemic to biblical religion (ethics) but do not work in a defensive and apologetic mode—that is, do not think under the Christian gaze—what often results is a position that more freely occupies metaphysical precepts common in a Christianity these Hasidic masters little knew and little cared about. The societal, historical, and even theological calcification of doctrines that appear to divide Judaism and Christianity categorically are somewhat undone in a case where Jews can be liberated from having to defend Judaism and are able to think inside it unencumbered by an external gaze. I hope the breakdown of these and other conventions offered by Hasidism may provide new ways of comparative thinking about “Jewish” ethics as part of the larger discourse in the study of religion.

4

MALKHUT AS KENOSIS Malkhut and the Zaddik in Ya’akov Koppel Lifshitz of Mezritch’s Sha’arei Gan Eden The zaddik is God’s possibility for humanity in a physical body. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, “Jews in Jewish-Christian-Moslem Dialogue”

I

The doctrine of the zaddik (“righteous one”) stands at the very epicenter of Hasidic spirituality. Described by Arthur Green as an axis mundi, Hasidism’s zaddikism is considered by many to be the most innovative aspect of Hasidic spirituality.1 Linking the zaddik with kabbalistic sefirah of yesod begins in prekabbalistic rabbinic literature, reading the verse ve-zaddik yesod olam (“and the zaddik is the foundation of the world,” Prov. 10:25). This continues as kabbalistic nomenclature (yesod marking the ninth sefirah) is applied to biblical verses and rabbinic dicta.2 The tight linkage of the zaddik to yesod is problematized when the zaddik is linked to the messiah in medieval kabbalistic, Sabbatean, and early Hasidic literature. The messiah is traditionally linked genealogically to King David, who in Kabbalah embodies the sefirah of malkhut, the tenth sefirah and feminine extension of the masculine yesod.3 In Sabbatean literature, Sabbatai Zevi is depicted both as zaddik and messiah (or zaddik as messiah), and the relationship between yesod and malkhut becomes more complex.4 For example, the anonymous treatise Zaddik Yesod Olam, a mystical commentary on the Book of Ruth thought to be a late Sabbatean work, develops the notion of yesod in a messianic light.5 But even in that text there are essentially two messiahs; the goel (redeemer) linked with yesod who redeems the world in potentia (according to Yehuda Liebes, referring to Sabbatai Zevi)6 and the messiah (Boaz) linked to

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malkhut who will redeem the world in actu.7 The relationship between zaddik and messiah, and by extension yesod and malkhut, is not limited to the overly messianic doctrines of Sabbateanism. It also comes into play in the zaddikism of Hasidism in conjunction with Hasidism’s more covert messianism.8 It is true that the early kabbalistic treatise Sefer Bahir delineates the zaddik as the tenth, not the ninth sefirah, and early kabbalistic texts influenced by the Bahir repeat this. But by the time of the zoharic corpus in the late thirteenth century, the zaddik is already solidly in the realm of the sefirah of yesod.9 Ya’akov Koppel Lifshitz has long been considered a link between Sabbateanism and Hasidism.10 Isaiah Tishby argued that there is ample evidence to surmise that Koppel was more than simply familiar with the writings of the most well-known Sabbatean, Nathan of Gaza (1643–1680). Tishby claims that Koppel espoused a veiled Sabbateanism that could be viewed through his adaptation of Nathan’s metaphysical worldview, sometimes quoting verbatim and without attribution from Nathan’s unpublished manuscripts. Accepting Tishby’s basic assumption regarding Koppel’s ascription to Nathan’s metaphysical system, I examine Koppel’s construction of malkhut, and not (only) yesod, as embodying the zaddik, solidifying the connection between the ­zaddik and the messiah. This could possibly expose another veiled dimension of Koppel’s Sabbateanism. It may have offered Hasidic masters who read Koppel’s work carefully one way of articulating the zaddik/messiah as both yesod and ­malkhut, thereby enabling Hasidic zaddikism to integrate its messianism within a kabbalistic metaphysic.

x The basic structure of my argument in this chapter is that Koppel’s reading of malkhut as both empty and full of God is an example of what becomes a kenotic rendering of the zaddik in early Hasidism.11 Uncharacteristic of writers of this genre, Koppel openly proclaimed his insights on malkhut as innovative (hidush) and a corrective (tikkun) to previous kabbalistic texts.12 I show that Koppel’s notion of malkhut as simultaneously concealed in, and concealing, eyn sof (the infinite and radically transcendent notion of God beyond all emanation) offers an intriguing revision of the zoharic idea of malkhut (the lowest of the ten sefirot) as empty of divine light and void of substance. Finally, Koppel claimed that since malkhut is embodied in the messianic figure (or the Hasidic zaddik) he can descend into the netherworld (using Nathan of Gaza’s nomenclature, tehiru) to rectify creation’s fundamental flaw.13 This is

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because when such an individual (the zaddik or messiah) embodies malkhut and thus contains within him eyn sof, he is by definition not susceptible to demonic defilement because malkhut is not victim to the “rupture of the vessels” (shevirat ha-kelim) that would cause it to be vulnerable to demonic influence.14 This notion of the zaddik, taking both radical and moderate forms in the history of Hasidism, is one of its most daring and innovative contributions to normative Judaism. Koppel articulated the zaddik in a kenotic form that I claim is tied to incarnational thinking, a notion that Jews have long argued distinguishes Judaism from Christianity.15 This kenotic rendering of malkhut also nods toward antinomianism, whereby the zaddik/messiah, who is empty and full of God, whose substance is unaffected by the Lurianic “rupture of the vessels,” must engage with the demonic in order to fulfill the final stage of redemption. In a kenotic reading, the zaddik must suffer in this world in order to redeem it, and this suffering is an act of divine disclosure. When the zaddik is likened to malkhut, thus embodying a kind of “divinity empty of divinity,” the kenotic dimension of zaddikim emerges. The zaddik’s alignment with malkhut, the cosmic realm empty of divinity (in the Zohar, leit la me-garma klum—“there is nothing in it at all” )16 introduces a dimension of kenotic thinking that resonates quite strongly with the Christian notion of God’s emptying Godself in order to enter the world and redeem it through the figure of a cruciform God-man.17 As we will see, kenosis is not simply a statement about Jesus as the divine empty self but also a statement about that emptiness as the very fullness of God. Connecting Christian kenotic thinking to kabbalistic renderings of malkhut as the cosmic realm empty of divinity would then require not simply a vision of malkhut as an emptying of divinity but an example where the very emptying of God is an illustration of God’s fullness. We will see this below in the writings of Ya’akov Koppel, following a brief discussion of malkhut and the depiction of Moses as the epitome of humility, a kenotic characteristic that is also tied to the messianic personality.

II A hymn in Paul’s letter to the Philippians 2:6–11 contains the sole mention in the New Testament of the term “kenosis,” or divine emptying. This hymn has been studied extensively and is often viewed as the beginning of Christology.18 Some scholars argue that kenosis, while referring to Jesus in the hymn, is also a reference to the nature of God: “Does, then, a kenotic Son reveal a kenotic

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Father, a kenotic Christ image a kenotic God.”19 The verses read as follows (in the New Revised Standard Edition of the Bible): 5–Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6–who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7–but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8–he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even on a cross. (Phil. 2:5–11)

While the hymn as written obviously refers to Christ, it also is interpreted to refer to a kenotic divinity, that is, a new vision of divinity where, as Michael Gorman suggests, “God is not a God of power and weakness but the God of power in weakness.”20 In this sense, Christ is revealed as divine in the crucifixion because in that act of death, ultimate self-emptying, or suffering, the true nature of God becomes manifest.21 On this reading, the divinity of Jesus is that he is the fully embodied notion of emptiness that humans cannot attain. In Christian exegesis the kenotic trajectory begins in its rendering of the “suffering servant” in Isaiah 40–55, continues in Philippians 2:5–11, and reaches into the ascetic life of the early Church. The debates around Philippians 2:5–11 are far beyond the scope of this chapter. Three points reading kenosis and kenotic thinking, however, become relevant to us as Christian kenotic thinking rooted in the hymn in Philippians 2—the notion of divine emptying as the fullness of God—is transposed to Ya’akov Koppel’s version of malkhut and/as eyn sof and its relationship to the zaddik/messiah in his work Sha’arei Gan Eden. First, it is widely accepted that this hymn is one of the first examples of the worship of Jesus. Its early origin (whether authored by Paul or adopted by him) indicates that it likely originated in a Jewish-Christian context. This is significant not because there is any direct evidence of Philippians 2:5–11 influencing mystical Jewish literature but because it suggests that first-century Jews who had become Christians and who were still living very much within a Jewish framework likely viewed this notion of divine emptying as not incongruent with familiar Jewish nomenclature. On this Richard Bauckham writes: “It [the hymn] is an important piece of evidence for the way early Christians included Jesus in their Jewish monotheistic faith in the one God, thereby creating, not a deviation from Jewish monotheism that can be appropriately be called christological monotheism.”22 Second, as mentioned above, some scholars view this hymn as a reference to God and not (only) the human Jesus and thus our transposition from Jesus to malkhut is not

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unreasonable. Finally, this hymn has eschatological as well as Christological implications, a notion that will become relevant when transposed to the malkhut as the zaddik/messiah in later Jewish literature.23

x In the normative Jewish tradition, specifically regarding the question of prophecy, Moses is viewed as coming as close as any human to achieving a state of emptiness—embodied in the trait of humility—that would merit a vision of divine essence.24 Elliot Wolfson sums this up succinctly: “The various rabbinic comments regarding humility may be summarized by stating that it was widely treated as the moral virtue that could lead one to attain the supreme religious experience of dwelling in the presence of the divine.”25 The rabbinic term used to describe Moses’s elevated prophetic status is “a mirror that shines” (­aspaklaria she-me’ira), understood as a clear lens almost completely unfettered by human limitations.26 This notion of being a “clear lens” as representing the traditional view of the perfected state of humanness suggests a kind of emptying whereby the human becomes a clear channel for the divine message, ­albeit in this case the emptiness is not the divine emptying Godself of divinity to become human but the human emptying himself from that which would limit his apprehension of the divine.27 Incarnation and theosis (and by extension k­ enosis), here depicted not in the divinization of the human but in the preparedness for divine apprehension, extend in opposite directions—incarnation from the divine to the human, theosis from the human to the divine. Yet the structural similarities between the two—each requiring a transparency between the divine and the human—enable us to examine them as two sides of the same phenomenon.28 And, harking back to Richard Baukham’s comment regarding kenosis, both are possible within the monotheism of ancient Israel. Perhaps the most canonical description of this perfected human state of Moses can be found in Moses Maimonides’ “Introduction to the Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot)” known as “The Eight Chapters.” In chapter seven, Maimonides develops the perfected state of Mosaic prophecy:29 One can find many midrashim and aggadot what is found in the gemara that there are prophets who have a vision of God behind many barriers [mehizot] and those that envision God through fewer barriers. Each one depends on one’s closeness to God according to his level of prophecy. . . . When Moses knew that for him no barriers remained that he had not already removed—because he

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has perfected all of his characteristics and intellectual imperfections—he asked God to view God’s essence [mahut ha-Shem yitbarakh] in its fullness [al amitat meziuto], as said [to God] “Show me Your glory” (Exod. 33:18). God responded that this is impossible because your intellect is embedded in physical matter [homer], that is to say, Moses was human, upon whom it is said, “A human cannot see me and live” (Exod. 33:20). There was nothing separating Moses from a full apprehension of God’s true essence except one clear barrier—his human intellect that was not separated from matter.30 In response to his question, God granted Moses an apprehension of the divine superior to that which he achieved before asking the question.31 In the end, however, it was impossible to grant ­Moses what he asked for because Moses [as human] was corporeal.32

While Moses perfected every dimension of his humanness as a prerequisite to see God, the one thing he could not transcend was humanness itself.33 Maimonides offered the verse “A human cannot see me and live” as a way to attenuate the Mosaic experience of prophecy. It was this last barrier that ultimately made his request for a vision of divine essence unattainable.34 This depiction of Mosaic prophecy was countered in Maimonides’ works, for example in Book II of The Guide of the Perplexed, where he wrote about prophecy, “For his intellect attained such strength that all the gross faculties in the body creased to function.” Similarly, in other places he stated that Moses transcended his corporeality and reached an angelic state, something quite different from what is found in “The Eight Chapters.”35 Nonetheless, taking Maimonides at his word, the two relevant elements are: (1) perfection as a kind of emptying, here described as the removal of barriers consisting of human desires and imperfections; and (2) emptying as a necessary but not sufficient condition to have a full vision, or become one with, God. Maimonides’ limiting human apperception, even in Mosaic prophecy, was often subtly—sometimes openly—challenged in the kabbalistic tradition after him and, equally important, in the mystical traditions in ancient Judaism that preceded him.36 That is, Maimonides’ commitment to the Neoplatonic notion of negative theology extends to the limitation of any human transcending humanness such that an experience of the divine is plausible.37 The kabbalistic tradition and, more relevant here, Hasidism, in different ways and to different degrees, both adopt and challenge the epistemological limitations Maimonides codified in “The Eight Chapters,” Mishneh Torah, and The Guide of the Perplexed.38 For some authors, such as Abraham Abulafia, it results in theories of unio mystica.39 In other cases, as in certain strains of Hasidism, it takes the

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form of strong notions of devekut or divine cleaving.40 In the case of Lurianic Kabbalah, we find extravagant attempts to “perform” death or near-death experiences through ritual, precisely in order to bring adepts to the place where they are not limited by “A human cannot see me and live.”41 In the case of the Zohar, while the lines distinguishing the divine and the human are never fully crossed, with Abulafia it probably comes as close as any canonical text prior to Hasidism that gestures toward a re-evaluation of the Maimonidean matrix illustrated above in “The Eight Chapters.”42 A systematic critique of Maimonides in relation to Kabbalah was proffered by Meir Ibn Gabbai (late fifteenth century) in his Avodat ­ha-Kodesh. Ibn Gabbai touched on what could be thought of as a condition of incarnational thinking when he argued for the eminence of the human soul as rooted in the divine itself, even higher than the angels.43 In addition, if we permit ourselves to transpose humility with emptiness, we find among kabbalists two distinct yet connected dimensions of emptiness that are embodied by both Moses and David, each personifying elements of the messianic personality.44 For kabbalists such as Moshe Cordovero (1522–1570), humility is embodied in both keter, the highest sefirah, and malkhut, the lowest. Both represent a state of nothingness, keter the nothingness close to the infinity of eyn sof, and malkhut the nothingness of the emptying of God in the cosmos.45 Cordovero wrote: “A person should accustom himself in these traits. Most important, he should comprehend [yitfos, lit. “grasp”], the most important of all, humility, because it is the first of all traits, the first realm embodied in keter.”46 Humility is then connected to mercy and mercy is connected to God as keter: “There is no embodiment of tolerance and humility like our God in the trait of keter which is the very telos of mercy.”47 Cordovero further suggested that humility is embodied in malkhut, described by him as “poverty.”48 In the case of malkhut, however, the humility is not embodied in Moses (who, following Maimonides’ description in “The Eight Chapters,” may be likened in kabbalistic nomenclature to keter) but rather in David. “And David acted in accordance with this trait [malkhut] as it is written, “For I am alone and afflicted [ani]” (Ps. 25:16).”49 The correlation between humility (anavah) and poverty (aniut)—here related to Moses and David—is alluded to in rabbinic literature but never developed.50 However, the correlation between Mosaic (and perhaps Davidic) humility and God was made quite explicit by Hayyim Vital (1543–1620) in his Sha’arei ­Kedusha, a comment that comes quite close to kenotic thinking. Vital wrote: There is no greater virtue than humility. Moses, the greatest of the prophets, in Torah, and fear of God was only praised because is his humility, as it is written,

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“And the man Moses was very humble” [Num. 12:3]. Go and learn from God who lowered Himself from the heavens to dwell among the lowly [shefalim], as it is written, “I dwell on high in holiness, yet with the contrite and lowly in spirit” [Isa. 57:15].51

This depiction of Moses is common in rabbinic literature. Cordovero and ­Vital’s linking them to both keter and malkhut suggests an interesting correlation between emptiness (humility), as embodied in both the highest and lowest dimensions of the cosmos, and then linking them to the two messianic personas in classical Judaism: Moses and David.52 These two dimensions of humility, Moses as keter and David as malkhut, suggest a correlation between two dimensions of divine emptiness/fullness that becomes explicit in Koppel’s Sha’arei Gan Eden.53 To depict malkhut as empty of God is one step toward kenotic thinking, but it misses the kenotic mark absent the notion of emptiness itself being the fullness of God. Cordovero and Vital, as two examples among many, seemed to divide fullness as emptiness in the realm beyond human comprehension, keter, while emptiness as poverty, or humility, is embodied in m ­ alkhut or shekhina, the divine realm that exists within the experiential purview of the human. Koppel collapsed both categories into malkhut, much closer to a Jewish notion of kenosis. The distinction between envisioning God and “becoming” divine is important. While Maimonides never said exactly what would happen if Moses “saw” God—that is, according to Maimonides’ criteria, if Moses were able to transcend his very humanness—one possibility might be that the act of vision would be tantamount to an act of theosis. Having a full vision of God is comparable to becoming a kind of divine being, which would be impossible according to Maimonides’ notion of the divine as radically transcendent.54 The notion of theosis or the divinization of the human is not foreign to ancient Israelite religion and appears in various places, most overtly in the ­Similitudes in the Book of Enoch and other pre-rabbinic texts.55 Of course, the difference between theosis and incarnation is that the latter describes the divine becoming human while the former describes the human becoming divine. Nonetheless, there is a structural similarity in that both notions work under the assumption that traversing one realm to another is possible; both accept that the barrier separating the human from the divine is permeable. ­Describing mystical union in Judaism, Wolfson puts it this way: “The ontic identification of the Jewish soul with the divine necessitates the logical possibility of union between them.”56 In some Eastern Orthodox traditions, for

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example, theosis is a possibility precisely and only because of the one-time incarnation of God in Christ. Clement of Alexandria wrote: “The Word of God became Man that you also may learn from a man how man becomes God.”57 That is, while incarnation and theosis are not identical, the former makes the latter possible. Theosis in Christianity should not necessarily be conflated with apotheosis, the latter being the promotion of certain humans to divine beings, although that seems to be what is implied in the Similitudes.58 Gorman offers a tempered definition of theosis that may be of heuristic value: “Rather, theosis means that humans become like God. The tradition of theosis in Christian theology after the New Testament begins with the famous dictum of Irenaeus, later developed by Athanasius: ‘God became what we are to make us what he is.’59 ­Theosis is about divine intention and action, human transformation, and the telos of human existence—union with God.”60 This definition of theosis obviously has resonance, especially among mystics, with the Jewish notion of imitatio Dei manifest through emulating divine attributes (such as mercy, love, and kindness). Yet theosis in Christianity goes one step further in saying that the ability to be like God is rooted in God becoming like us, or, “what we are.” Imitatio Dei in Judaism is predicated on revelation (how else would we know the divine attributes?) while in Christianity it is predicated on incarnation (we could not be like God unless God is “like us”). This is where Judaism and Christianity part ways, and yet one can still ask whether the distinction is one of degree or kind.61 In kenotic thinking, this “like us” is precisely to be empty, an exercise in (divine) self-sacrifice that then becomes a motif of Christian devotion, for example, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23).62 In Judaism, the human emulation of God is achieved through the performance or emulation of divine attributes revealed in Scripture. In Iranaeus’s formulation, that emulation comes through God as revealed in his “becoming what we are,” that is, through incarnation. Gorman puts it this way: “Theosis is transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ.”63 Here a link is made between theosis (the Christian version of imitatio Dei as imitatio Christi) and kenosis. It is precisely in the emptying of God in the human God-man of Jesus that we can understand that which God wants us to emulate. The self-emptying of the divine into the human, not only to become

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“what we are” but to succumb to human suffering and death, is precisely the way in which kenosis functions as a paradigm of human devotion, both to God and to other humans.64 It is also arguably a foundation of early Christology. This notion of self-emptying, if linked to humility, has deep roots in biblical religion. Moses is considered the greatest human in Judaism as a result of his humility (“And the man Moses was the humblest of all men that walked the earth,” [Num. 12:3]).65 His vision is the clearest because he emptied (or purified) himself from all the limitations of the human except his humanness. While a separation remains between the Jewish understanding of emulating God through divine attributes revealed in Scripture and the Christian notion examined here through Paul as kenosis that is essentially theosis (“Christianization is deification, or theosis”),66 we have two traditions functioning along parallel lines. Both envision the imitation of God as essential to proper belief and devotion. Both view emulation through some form of emptying: in Moses, humility and ethical perfection; in Jesus, divine emptying—God “becoming what we are”—God willingly succumbing to suffering. While Maimonides, whose God is radically transcendent and whose essence is unknowable to human beings, refuses to accept any crossing of essential barriers, his kabbalistic colleagues are less committed to the opaque barrier separating the human from the divine. One dimension of the complex ways in which kabbalists negotiate the translucent barriers separating human experience from the divine is in the tenth sefirah, known as malkhut, one that, unlike all the other sefirot, seems to have no intrinsic divine substance and yet is counted among the cosmic potencies of the Godhead. As we will see below in the writings of Koppel, malkhut considered as empty of the divine may indicate in fact that it contains divinity in unadulterated fullness. That malkhut is, or contains, eyn sof. This may offer an interesting articulation of Jewish kenotic thinking whereby the empty vessel of malkhut represents the very fullness of God. That divinity in its fullness is revealed though emptiness. Before moving to Koppel, however, it is worth rehearsing some of the ways in which malkhut (and its correlate, the shekhina) is depicted in Kabbalah and its scholarly analysis. The operative dimension in the zoharic rendering of malkhut is one of emptiness, described as “there is nothing in it whatsoever.”67 This emptiness of m ­ alkhut functions as a vehicle for that which lies above it and serves as a founding principle of theosophic Kabbalah. Gershom Scholem offers this felicitous description: “All the active forces [in the Godhead] are in turn united in the tenth Sefira,

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Malkhut or Shekhina, God’s total rule, into which they flow as into an ocean. The living forces of the Godhead pass into Creation through the medium of the last Sefira, represented in symbols of receptivity and femaleness.”68 There are two dominant and overlapping themes regarding malkhut in classical Kabbalah: receptivity/passivity and femininity. In the Zohar and subsequent Kabbalah there is a division between the upper and the lower shekhina, the former receiving divine effluence from above and the latter serving as the catalyst for, or even the very first stage of, creation. In this sense malkhut is the  manifestation of divinity in the world.69 Whether the upper and lower ­malkhut represent two distinct cosmic entities or one entity with two functions is debated among scholars. This distinction, while important in understanding how kabbalists negotiate the transition from the last supernal realm to the first corporeal one, need not concern us, both because Koppel does not utilize it and because it does not add to the operative definition of malkhut as empty insofar as it is a foundation for kenotic thinking in Kabbalah. The notion of pure receptivity in regards to malkhut/shekhina was altered somewhat in the sixteenth century, when in Lurianic Kabbalah the term mayin nukvin (female waters) was used to refer to an active form of the feminine that arouses the masculine (mayin dekhurin/masculine waters) toward sexual union.70 Mayin nukvin periodically appears in the Zohar but not to that a­ ffect. Finally, malkhut/shekhina is also tied to the demonic, or sitra ahra. Here we find that it serves as the nexus between cosmic effluence and the dross (­kelippah) that constitutes part of the corporeal world. In that capacity malkhut is sometimes referred as deficient, the aspaklaria she-eyna me’ira, the “mirror that does not shine,” the opposite of how Mosaic prophecy is described. In this sense, emptiness is not a place for divine fullness, as we will see in Koppel, but its opposite. There are many ways the emptiness of malkhut is understood in the postZohar tradition. Two representative descriptions follow, one from Moses ­Cordovero, the other from Isaac Luria. Cordovero writes: There are two forms of the aspaklaria [the cosmic mirror]; one that shines and one that does not shine. The one that shines is tiferet and the one that does not shine is malkhut. Rabbi Moshe explains in Sefer ha-Shem that tiferet is the pure lens and Moses prophesized and saw through this [lens] seeing things as they were [al boryan] without the aid of a lens of metaphor [hida]. And this is what it means when it says, “I make myself known to him in a vision” [Num. 12:6].

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Cordovero then cites two passages from Tikkunei Zohar that appear to contradict this description claiming that prophecy is not rooted in tiferet but the lower two sefirot of nezah and hod. Cordovero continues, When malkhut is unified with tiferet it is called a clear lens and when tiferet departs from malkhut it is called a lens that does not shine [aspaklaria she-eyna me’ira]. This does not contradict what was said before since the essential clarity and light does indeed come from tiferet. This is all embodied in the secret of the sexual union between nezah and hod through the yesod in nezah and in hod and in yesod they are all one.71

Without getting into the details of the ostensible discrepancy between Sefer ha-Shem and the Tikkunei Zohar on the cosmic roots of prophecy, we can see from this brief excerpt that in the Zohar, as interpreted by Cordovero, malkhut is deficient only when separated from its cosmic male counterpart tiferet and that prophecy, indeed rooted in nezah and hod, are considered part of tiferet because the unity of nezah and hod draw down divine effluence from tiferet which is above them. Moshe, who serves as the biblical depiction of the sefirah nezah, thus ultimately receives prophecy from tiferet as thus embodies the “clear lens.” Luria’s description is somewhat different but still responds to the ambiguity of the emptiness of malkhut articulated in the Zohar. In Etz Hayyim, the compendia of Luria’s teaching redacted by his erstwhile disciple Hayyim Vital, Luria teaches as follows: The light of malkhut leaves no resonance [reshimo] and all of its aspects rise and depart. This is the reason malkut is called a lens that does not shine that has nothing of its own [aspaklaria she-eyna me’ira de-leit la me-garma klum]. This is because no resonance is left in her except the resonance of yesod that still shines upon her [from above]. There is another reason for this that was not mentioned [earlier]. When the divine light began to descend, the [highest sefirah] keter remained bound to the Emanator and did not descend at all. Hokhma [the second sefirah] then went to take the place of keter [this is required all the sefirot to rise up one notch, SM]. Malkhut rose up to yesod and left the vessel of malkhut empty of light. This is why malkhut is called a lens that does not shine that has nothing of its own [aspaklaria she-eyna me’ira].

Luria describes the emptiness of malkhut as a consequence of a malfunction in divine emanation. As the highest sefirah did not, could not, separate from its essential source—in this sense keter and malkhut share the fate of being tran-

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sitional realms, keter from eyn sof to the cosmos, malkhut from the cosmos to the corporeal world—the light of each sefirah had to rise to occupy the space created from keter’s unwillingness to descend. This left the vessel of malkhut empty as there was nothing below it in the cosmic realm to fill the empty space resulting from her light ascending to yesod. Both Cordovero and Luria equivocate about the emptiness of malkhut. Cordovero suggests it is only empty when union with tiferet is not operative. Luria distinguishes between the light of malkhut (which rises up to yesod) and its empty vessel. These are two among many renderings of malkhut’s emptiness and suggest that kabbalists are somewhat uncomfortable with an empty cosmic realm of malkhut and yet remain committed to its empty status as canonized in the Zohar. Koppel offered another rendition of emptiness as a sign of fullness, a kenotic interpretation of malkhut as the completion of divine emanation. Given the multivalent dimensions of malkhut in classical Kabbalah, some of which depicted malkhut as a receptacle for higher divine light, it is no surprise that much of the scholarly work on malkhut has focused on its status as the feminine often described in the Zohar as alma de-nukva (the world of the hole/feminine). Scholem’s initial depiction of malkhut as the feminine aspect of God in Kabbalah held for decades until it was challenged by the groundbreaking work of Elliot Wolfson who, using psychoanalytic and postmodern theory, argued that the purported feminine aspect of malkhut/shekhina is not accurate. Rather, the feminine serves largely as a temporary, exilic appendage to the masculine with no independent status; it is absorbed back into the masculine androgyne as part of the redemptive process.72 This thesis has spurred a vigorous debate and prompted dozens of books and articles on Kabbalah and gender. This is merely to point out that malkhut as the feminine and the status of that female potency has dominated the discussion on its role in kabbalistic cosmology. Less attention has been paid to the resonance of the notion of malkhut as divine emptiness (regardless of the gender implications), which is how it is described in theosophic Kabbalah. Below I examine the notion of malkhut as both empty and full, or empty as full, of the divine, an illustration of Jewish kenotic thinking in Koppel’s writings.

III Rabbi Ya’akov Koppel (Lifshitz) (d. 1740) lived and worked in Mezritch (now Mezhirichi), a village in western Ukraine that would become a center of Hasidism only a few decades after his death.73 He is best known for his kabbalistic

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commentary to the siddur entitled Kol Ya’akov and his kabbalistic work Sha’arei Gan Eden. In both he refers to his lengthy commentary to the Zohar, Nahalat Ya’akov, that is no longer extant. His kabbalistic perspective was strongly influenced by Israel Sarug (d. 1610), the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­ century kabbalist whose writings were circulated widely among pietists in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century.74 Koppel’s work stands between two great movements that emerged in Eastern Europe decades after his death: ­Hasidism and Frankism, the latter a radical form of Jewish antinomianism led by Jacob Frank (1726–1791) who, with most of his disciples, converted to Christianity in 1759.75 While Koppel openly opposed Sabbateanism in his work, Tishby, in the most comprehensive essay on Koppel to date, argues that Koppel, like other crypto-Sabbateans, adopted themes from the work of the Sabbatean Nathan of Gaza.76 After Koppel’s death, his works received approbation from influential Hasidic masters such as Levi Isaac of Berdichev (1740–1809). A typical encomium reads, “Everyone knows that the writings of the author [Koppel] were viewed positively by the Besht, who embraced his writings in his arms because he [Koppel] was a faithful servant a great and wise kabbalist in these esoteric matters.”77 While the historical veracity of this as well as similar comments about Koppel is in doubt, they resulted in Koppel’s writings emerging as an important basis for the fundamentals of Hasidic Judaism. Tishby concludes that the lines distinguishing the new Hasidim and Sabbatean kabbalists were not definitively drawn in the decades immediately preceding the emergence of Hasidism as a movement in the 1770s and that Koppel’s work is a crucial link connecting Sabbateanism and Hasidism. In any case, it is clear that Koppel’s writings were widely read by early and pre-Hasidic pietists and his kabbalistic worldview had a significant impact of the new Hasidic movement. Koppel’s commentary to the siddur Kol Ya’akov and his kabbalistic treatise Sha’arei Gan Eden were reprinted many times, signaling that his work is part of the canon of Kabbalah during Hasidism’s formative period.

IV

While the notion of the zaddik has a literary history that extends back to prophetic and rabbinic literature, including inter-testamental and apocryphal literature, the focus on the zaddik seems to have intensified in the Zohar, the textus classicus of medieval Kabbalah. It was in the Zohar, specifically around its protagonist Shimon bar Yohai, where the zaddik became a focus of the kabbalistic

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imagination. And it is in the Zohar where we find the merging of two distinct but not dissimilar tropes: the zaddik (specifically the zaddik of the generation or zaddik ha-dor) and the messiah.78 While righteousness was always linked to the messiah, in the Zohar Shimon bar Yohai played out his messianic role through his status as the singular zaddik whose vocation was both to conceal and reveal the secrets of Torah.79 Once the linkage between the zaddik of the generation and messiah is made in the Zohar, many discussions of the zaddik in subsequent kabbalistic literature have contained traces of that connection, either covertly or overtly, although not all zaddikim mentioned in kabbalistic literature are considered to be the messiah nor are all discussions about the zaddik by definition messianic. Yet the more generic notion of the zaddik in rabbinic literature as a righteous individual was transformed in the Zohar to something more prescient, more focused, and more charged with redemptive significance. This highly charged zaddikism, filtered through subsequent kabbalistic literature, arguably served as a cornerstone of early Hasidism.80 Two of the more conspicuous manifestations of what we may call pre-­ Hasidic zaddikism can be found in the latent messianism of Lurianic Kabbalah (sixteenth century) and the overt messianism of Sabbateanism (seventeenth century). Especially in the case of the latter, the figure of the zaddik as messiah looms large as the messianic figure Sabbatai Zevi is viewed as the final zaddik/ messiah who rectifies the world by descending into the realm of the demonic to liberate the final holy sparks lost during the rupture of creation (known as the breaking of the vessels or shevirat ha-kelim).81 While surely not the first messianic movement in post-Rabbinic Judaism, Sabbateanism distinguished itself in the way it constructed an entire metaphysical universe in order to justify the actions of one human being (not dissimilar from early Christianity).82 What occurs in Sabbatean literature, especially in the writings of Nathan of Gaza, is a complex metaphysics of the zaddik that justifies the notion of what Scholem called “redemption through sin,” loosely meaning that the zaddik/messiah must perform transgression, in the literature called “strange acts,” through intentional “transgression for the sake of heaven” (averah le-shem shamayim) in order to inaugurate redemption.83 Emerging only about a century after Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam in 1667 (the touchstone of Sabbateanism and the confirmation of its paradoxical metaphysics) and in the midst of intense Sabbatean activity in Eastern Europe, Hasidism developed zaddikism on the Zohar-Lurianic trajectory yet at times seemed to be critically responding to, and also absorbing, the z­ addikism/

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messianism of Sabbatean doctrine. Scholars of Hasidism have often speculated about the influence of Sabbateanism on Hasidism and pondered whether ­Hasidic masters either consciously or unconsciously adopted (or adapted) dimensions of Sabbatean doctrine while veiling its overt antinomian consequences.84 Alternatively, early Hasidism may have absorbed Sabbatean metaphysics (e.g., its specific reading of Lurianic Kabbalah) without necessarily drawing the practical antinomian conclusions of Sabbatean writers. Be that as it may, Hasidic zaddikism, while not always overtly messianic, was rarely void of a latent messianic impulse. One of the basic tenets of zaddikism in Kabbalah more generally was drawn from Proverbs 10:25, “The zaddik is the foundation of the world [ yesod olam].”85 Reading this back into the kabbalistic system of the ten sefirot, where yesod (also referring to the male organ) constitutes the ninth sefirah that serves as the conduit of the upper nine to malkhut (the feminine, final sefirah), kabbalists often viewed the zaddik as the (male) receptacle of the entire cosmic body that inseminates and sustains malkhut (or the shekhina) through sexual union (yihud). Among other things, this brought Arthur Green to label the Hasidic zaddik as an axis mundi around which the world revolves and Moshe Idel, from a similar but not identical perspective, to view the Hasidic zaddik as a magical shamanistic conduit connecting the cosmos to the material plane.86 The ostensible gender division of yesod as male and malkhut as female operative in kabbalistic teaching would problematize the attribution of malkhut to the zaddik. Yet these gender distinctions are often more nuanced in a mystical system where gender is a complex, liquid, and non-essentialized construct. 87 Below we cite one example of this in Sarug’s Limmudei Azilut, a kabbalistic text that was very influential in European Kabbalah in general and Koppel’s Sha’arei Gan Eden in particular. Know that in the situation under examination in olam ha-nekudim [the realm of the rupturing of the vessels] malkhut of the ten sefirot is concealed because it is attached to yesod, as we read in the Zohar.88 When malkhut is attached to yesod, that is, disclosed [and attached], it is referred to in the masculine, as it is written, “This [zeh, masculine] is the thing that Joshua circumcised” [Josh. 5:4]. Circumcision is the disclosure of the diadem [atarah]. When the diadem [­atarah/malkhut] is concealed and not seen it is referred to in the feminine ­language of zot,89 as it is written, [“This/zot, feminine] after my skin will have been peeled off [zot]. But I would behold God while still in my flesh”

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[Job  19:26]. This verse refers to Abraham, after he circumcised himself and made many converts [ gerim], and they were circumcised with him. This is the meaning of the verse [Job 19:26]. After I circumcised my foreskin [orlah] the nations of the world also peeled away theirs [zot], which is the member with the foreskin [and] it is thus called zot. That is, they peeled and cut to reveal their diadem. This is a clear indication to you that when the diadem is disclosed [through circumcision] it is called male/zeh and when it is concealed it is called female/zot. It is clear that when malkhut is in its place below yesod it is referred to in the feminine.90

Sarug is not particularly innovative here but merely expressing what already exists in previous Kabbalah: gender is a fluid category that is arguably more performative than essential.91 And yet this depiction of malkhut as both feminine and masculine may contribute to Koppel’s use of malkhut as the embodiment of the zaddik. Sarug argues that malkhut in its revealed (that is, circumcised) state is referred to as masculine. While still attached (davuk) to yesod, in its concealed state it is still not identical to it even as it takes on the masculine gender of yesod. In this sense circumcision transmorphs malkhut from its incomplete, concealed feminine state to a revealed masculine one.92 This creates more optimal conditions for malkhut as the house of the zaddik.

x Even given the conventional identification of the zaddik as yesod in Kabbalah, there remains some ambiguity about the Hasidic zaddik as constituting yesod. If we accept that the zaddik in the Zohar (as Shimon bar Yohai) is linked to the messiah and that most subsequent kabbalistic renderings maintain that linkage—often in an ambiguous way—the question of the zaddik as (also) malkhut, which would imply a stronger messianic emphasis, comes into play (malkhut is often the template of the messiah, linked to King David, malkhut beit David, the messianic prototype).93 This becomes especially resonant in contemporary Habad Hasidism, where Menahem Mendel Schneerson, seen by many in Habad as the messiah, is the seventh rebbe in the Habad lineage coinciding with malkhut being the seventh sefirah in the lower strata of the ten sefirot.94 Although less overt in other Hasidic traditions, the tension of Schneerson as yesod or malkhut remains operative.95 In any case, the difficultly with the zaddik as malkhut is that the Zohar and texts that follow describe malkhut as an empty vessel with no light or essence of its own. Moreover, malkhut is linked to the exiled shekhina who is in need of redemption and not

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the redeemer.96 Both in Sha’arei Gan Eden and Kol Ya’akov, Koppel presents a kenotic rendering of malkhut that strengthens the possibility of ­incorporating the zaddik, and later the Hasidic Rebbe, as malkhut, enabling Hasidism to more deeply incorporate the zaddik/messiah dimension into its doctrine of zaddikism. The fact that the hymn in Philippians 2:6–11 refers to the emptying, and humbling, of God into the body of the suffering messiah (Jesus as crucified) suggests a notion of a kenotic messianic figure that resonates in the configuration of the zaddik/messiah as malkhut that is both empty as well as serving to disclose the divine. There are essentially two innovative moves in Koppel’s rendering of malkhut that are relevant here. First, that the zaddik embodies malkhut and not exclusively yesod, that malkhut is linked to the righteous of Israel (shelomei emunei Yisrael, literally, those of Israel with perfect faith) that is then linked to the zaddik/messiah.97 A description of the zaddik as fullness, or shalem, is intentionally ambiguous because the notion of completeness and finality can point to yesod as the receptacle for the higher sefirot or to malkhut as the final station of the entire sefirotic system. Once there is a link between the zaddik and the messiah—or the zaddik is viewed as a messianic figure—the categories have blended, or complicated the distinction between yesod and malkhut. This is what happened in Koppel’s cosmology. Second, for Koppel the ostensible emptiness of malkhut mentioned in the Zohar (leit la me-garma klum) denotes a fullness, meaning that malkhut is rooted in the radically transcendent eyn sof and is not a product of emanation but houses eyn sof within her. Put otherwise, God is fully embodied (eyn sof ) precisely in the place where God seems to be absent (malkhut). Hence, ­malkhut has no essence because it is all essence, that is, both its internal light and its external vessels are identical.98 As we shall see, malkhut (concealed in eyn sof ) is the place where zimzum occurs but, unlike the higher six sefirot (hesed until yesod) malkhut, does not suffer divine rupture (shevirat ha-kelim).99 Thus, the one who embodies malkhut (zaddik/messiah) can descend into the netherworld to gather the fallen sparks and not be susceptible to defilement because he embodies eyn sof, as opposed to the divine lights of emanation that were all ruptured in the “shattering of the vessels.” If, as Tishby holds, Koppel was a crypto-Sabbatean, this may be the center of his metaphysical justification of Sabbatai Zevi that he may have gleaned from Nathan of Gaza even as he vociferously rejected Sabbateanism. Or perhaps Koppel is not an orthodox Sabbatean but does knowingly or unknowingly glean Sabbatean metaphysics from

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Nathan’s writings for his own purposes. In relation to Christology as founded on Philippians 2, the disclosure of Jesus as Messiah and God-Man lies precisely in his suffering crucifixion, viewed as the quintessential act of humbling, both of God and of man. In either case, the depiction of malkhut in Sha’arei Gan Eden makes no overt mention of any messiah per se (sincere or not, Koppel states his antipathy to Sabbateanism), and his Hasidic readers could easily have viewed this as an innovative rendering of the zaddik as malkhut that they adopted to serve their own particular needs.

V In the midst of a systematic analysis concerning the origin and development of the cosmological forces known in Lurianic Kabbalah as parzufim or sefirotic clusters,100 Koppel presents an elaborate discussion of the tenth sefirah known as malkhut, or kingship.101 The nature of this sefirah in zoharic teaching has been presented above. Suffice it to say here that the later kabbalistic theory of malkhut is founded on the zoharic notion that its distinctiveness is that it has no independent status—that it serves purely as a receptacle for the sefirot situated above it. As mentioned above, the Zohar’s description of malkhut as leit la me-garma klum (“it has nothing of its own”) becomes the sine qua non of later depictions of malkhut. While Koppel accepts this basic zoharic frame of malkhut, he offers a subversive understanding of what the Zohar and subsequently Lurianic Kabbalah mean by the notion of “emptiness,” arguing that this ostensibly empty vessel is rooted in and contains the radically transcendent dimension of God (eyn sof ). That is, malkhut’s very emptiness denotes a fullness that transcends those forces situated above it. The revelation of malkhut is kenotic in that it represents God’s fullness as it enters the lower realm of the cosmos and subsequently, the world. As a result, the carrier or one who embodies malkhut becomes the key to cosmic purification for reasons that will become clear presently. Koppel seems quite aware of the innovative nature of his reading. Preparing his reader for his unconventional interpretation he somewhat audaciously opens this section with the following words: “It is now a propitious time to reveal to you the great secret that some of the great ones that preceded me [kama min ha-rishonim] did not understand.”102 While Koppel rarely identifies who is intended in these cryptic warnings, it is safe to say he is referring to interpreters of the Lurianic School and sometimes even to Luria himself (in some places he mentions Luria explicitly as the object of his critique).

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While this rhetoric is not unique to this section of Sha’arei Gan Eden, here it denotes a radical departure from conventional understandings of malkhut. The distinctive kenotic rendering of malkhut that follows this proclamation of innovation (hidush) creates a foundation for the Hasidic doctrine of zaddikism and its subsequent messianism. It is precisely here that Hasidic zaddikism and Christology intersect even as they are not congruent. A hint of the connection between malkhut and the zaddik appeared at the outset of this section when Koppel wrote, “the sefirah of malkhut is called the righteous of Israel [shelomei emunei Yisrael] because malkhut completes [meshalemet] the ten [sefirot] of all righteous Israelites [emunei Yisrael ].” The connection between these righteous in Israel, the Israelite people, and the zaddik, or perhaps messiah, will become clear later on. The notion that the zaddik constitutes the collection, and completion, of Israel is a well-known idea in Kabbalah.103 Suffice it to say that Koppel was dealing as much with the construction of the zaddik or messiah as with the cosmological realm of malkhut even as he largely limited himself to metaphysical nomenclature. Following Tishby’s claim that Koppel was a crypto-Sabbatean, the righteous one may stand at the very center of his kenotic rendering of malkhut. That is, divine emptying is not only the character of m ­ alkhut but also of the zaddik/messiah. The central idea that flows through Koppel’s depiction of malkhut is that, as the tenth sefirah, it is constructed from a combination of two distinct sources, one peripheral and one essential (here he may be adopting the Lurianic distinction mentioned above between the light of malkhut and its vessel). The peripheral source is built on a common theme in the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah, rooted in a parable in the Provençal kabbalistic work Sefer Bahir, that each of the upper nine sefirot gives one portion (literally one-tenth) of their divine effluence to malkhut (this would give the higher nine sefirot nine parts and malkhut nine parts). Malkhut’s divine substance is solely borrowed from above, hence the statement in the Zohar that “malkhut has nothing of its own.” The unanswered question is: if malkhut’s totality derives from above, what is the origin and substance of its vessel that contains these higher lights? Many kabbalists suggest answers to this anomaly but do not seem overly concerned with the question. For Koppel this question becomes the foundation for the essential component of malkhut. The essential component is that malkhut (here is meant the generic malkhut of the four worlds of emanation, creation, formation, and action), unlike all the other sefirot, is actually rooted in the corresponding malkhut of the radically

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transcendent divine realm of eyn sof.104 More than that, Koppel suggests, it is not only that all forms of malkhut are rooted in this source, which far transcends the other sefirot, but that it (also) contains eyn sof within itself. This is not the case with the upper nine sefirot that are products of light emanating from the most pristine divine form of Primordial Man (Adam Kadmon). The radical implications of viewing malkhut as rooted in, and containing, eyn sof, will be examined below. For now, suffice it to say that, according to Koppel, malkhut is the only one of the ten sefirot whose construction combines this type of peripheral and essential dimension. Know that the essence of malkhut originates in the “world of garments” [olam ha-malbush]105 and is made from the remnant [reshum] that remains from the malkhut that is hidden in eyn sof. From the remnant of this remnant [reshum reshumo] emerges malkhut of “the world of emanation” [olam azilut] that we are dealing with. . . . Hence, every malkhut of every parzuf of every world and of every sefirah is constructed from this. And all of this is from the original resonance that remained from the malkhut that was embedded in eyn sof. This is the secret meaning of the verse, “The candle [is the mitzvah] and the Torah [is the light]” (Prov. 6:23). The mitzvah [in this verse] hints at malkhut and Torah hints at tiferet [representing the higher seven sefirot].106

Koppel used the distinction between malkhut and the higher nine sefirot in their relation to eyn sof—adducing Proverbs 6:23—to make a case as to why malkhut, in any of its many permutations, always retains a dimension of eyn sof that is lacking in the other sefirot.107 That is, the substance of malkhut’s emptiness is undifferentiated divinity (eyn sof ). Extending the analogy of the candle and the flame, he argues that “like a candle that can ignite many flames and never lose any of its essential light, so malkhut, whose essence is from malkhut in eyn sof, can divide itself into many parts [lit. “sparks”] and never ­diminish.”108 In the case of “Torah as light,” Koppel wrote that the Torah sheds light in the world through its own glory and does not divide itself like a candle. Thus, by extension, the light of Torah that emanates into the world is a light that is less than the light of its source. Thus we can never achieve pure Torah—all Torah reaches us in a diminished state through emanation. This observation is then read through the Lurianic notion of the four general permutations of the four letter name of God YHVH (‫)יהוה‬. The fourth, and ostensibly lowest, permutation of the divine name representing malkhut equals the numerical value of fifty-two and is spelled as follows ‫יוד ה"ה ו"ו ה"ה‬.

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The uniqueness of this spelling is that it is the only one of the four permutations where the spelling of the last three letters constitutes a simple repetition, i.e., ‫ה"ה ו"ו ה"ה‬. This is to hint that in the letter permutation representing ­malkhut, essence reproduces itself without any diminution. Koppel took from this that the uniqueness of malkhut is that each permutation contains the essence of its source. The absence of diminution is the sign of its pristine and unique status among the sefirot. Whereas the higher permutations represent diminished divinity as it filters through the higher nine sefirot, the lowest, humblest, dimension refracts divinity in an undifferentiated, full manner. One final example from Sha’arei Gan Eden: while each sefirah has its own permutation of YHVH, only the upper nine have corresponding vocalizations that serve as vowels. In Hebrew there are nine vocalization points that appear either beneath or above the letters, which are all consonants. Without the points, the proper vocalization of the consonants cannot be determined. In the Lurianic system each vowel represents one sefirah, as commonly used in Lurianic prayer meditations (kavanot).109 Luria posits that with only nine vowel points, malkhut does not have a corresponding vowel because “it has nothing of its own,” here meaning that it has no independent voice. Koppel explained this as follows: The vessels [of any sefirah] are built from the letters, and the vowels are like a soul to a body. The vowels are the essence of each vessel. Just as the body acts according to the dictates of the soul within it, so too the vowels create [lit. turn] the word to its will such as im or aim [both spelled as ‫ אם‬but each having a distinct meaning]. The chosen vowel also makes the word past, future, or present tense. Since malkhut’s vessel is from its essence [emphasis added] which is the secret of a candle igniting a candle, it has a divine name [of consonants] but it has no vowel to represent its inner light, or the essence of its vessel. This is what it means when it says “it has nothing of its own.”110

The emptiness of malkhut is now reconstructed to mean that its ostensible lack of substance is precisely owing to the lack of distinction between vessel and essence (or, outer and inner light). Recall that in the citation above Luria distinguished between the light and vessels of malkhut to make a point about the emptiness of malkhut as described in the Zohar. In malkhut the vessel is created in an undiminished state from its essence, which is eyn sof. On this reading, malkhut’s “emptiness” denotes its fullness, it has no essence because it is all essence. As a vessel, it receives light from the upper sefirot, but it stands inde-

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pendent, and thus not in need of any higher emanation because it already carries the source of all emanation. The phrase “[malkhut] has nothing of its own” can be read in relation to its essential dimension. That is, not being a product of emanation like the upper sefirot (Torah as light versus mitzvah as candle), “it has nothing of its own” refers to the fact that it is full of eyn sof (perhaps is eyn sof !), that there is no distinction in malkhut between vessel and essence, between hovering light (or makif ) and inner light (or penimi). What it receives from the upper sefirot is peripheral to its essential quality as a carrier of eyn sof. In order to deepen our understanding of the kenotic nature of Koppel’s presentation of malkhut here and its relevance to the Hasidic doctrine of the zaddik, I now turn to the role malkhut plays in the Lurianic myth of zimzum and rupture (shevirat ha-kelim). According to the Lurianic system, the conditions for creation begin with divine contraction, or zimzum, an act of divine self-limitation that creates the conditions for a creation independent of God’s radical transcendence (eyn sof).111 The complexity of this doctrine is beyond the scope of this inquiry. Suffice it to say that this self-limiting act produces the flow of divine effluence into a set of vessels that are ill-prepared to receive it, resulting in a rupture, after which the vessels fragment and descend into what becomes the realm of the demonic. The ruptured fragments carry with them into the netherworld embedded sparks, known as the 288 sparks trapped in the demonic. The role of Israel in this drama is to gather and liberate these sparks through mitzvot and proper contemplative practices (this might also include the conversion of those gentiles whose souls house fallen divine sparks), allowing them to return to their roots above resulting in a final zimzum—this time not followed by rupture—as a prelude to the redemption when all of creation folds back into undifferentiated divinity. Since malkhut contains eyn sof, it makes sense that zimzum, or divine contraction, originates there. In fact, Koppel stated that malkhut is the very origin of all creation and thus the place where zimzum begins. All things that are emanated, created, and formed must be rooted in eyn sof, which is all rooted in the malkhut that is embedded in eyn sof.112 From there [that is, the place of malkhut of eyn sof] all things emerge. This malkhut is the source of the surrounding light [or igullim] and straight light [or yosher] [that fills the void after zimzum].113 We have said that the secret of zimzum is that it begins in the middle-point which is the malkhut of malkhut that is concealed in eyn sof. 114

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What matters for us is that zimzum is rooted in malkhut, thus malkhut generates all of creation. More important, the malkhut of eyn sof that generates all of creation is also housed in an undiminished state in the malkhut of all worlds. The real innovation here, which may reveal something about early Hasidic ­zaddikism, is the next piece in this puzzle: the parameters of divine rupture and the formation of the demonic. In his next chapter, Koppel argued that the five upper sefirot (from hesed to hod) descend in a fractured state into the vessel of yesod and from there to malkhut. After [yesod] receives all of the [five] lights from the upper section of the ­tehiru [void] before it can transmit them to malkhut, the lights break and malkhut only receives the portion that she receives. If she had received her portion directly through the yesod that was particular to her [that is, yesod of malkhut] she would have persevered. However, since she received these lights from an already broken vessel [yesod of the higher sefirot] they came [to her] with raging fury and she fainted, reaching the gates of death but she did not die because her vessel was not broken but only crushed and made into a smooth wooden vessel [a wooden vessel with no receptacle or beit kibul]. And since she did not die, no kelippah (demonic) existed within her like the kelippot that existed in the other broken vessels. . . . 115 Therefore, the sages say that a smooth wooden vessel cannot be defiled because [the kelippot/demonic] have no roots in it.116 Hence all rectifications [tikkunim] that are consistently made to liberate the holy sparks from the kelippot are all done through the sefirah of malkhut. It is malkhut that descends to the depths of the demonic [the lower part of the tehiru] and returns those holy sparks to their roots in the sacred.117

There is much that can be said about this rich depiction of the divine rupture, but for our limited purposes what is striking is the way Koppel first described how the rupture of the vessels seems to be taking place above, and not in, ­malkhut and how malkhut is damaged but not broken by receiving them from an already broken yesod. Moreover, the traumatic experience of receiving these raging shards of light makes malkhut into a vessel that, by definition, cannot be defiled. The result of all this is that malkhut can, and must, descend into the netherworld to elevate the remaining shards that fell. This is often the vocation relegated to the zaddik or messianic figure. Malkhut can do this successfully because, as a smooth wooden vessel not susceptible to defilement according to the halakha that states that a smooth vessel is not contaminated, she is beyond the reach of the demonic. From a kenotic perspective, malkhut,

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or the messianic zaddik, represents the realm above death, precisely from her lowly place, because she is rooted in eyn sof above. It is precisely in that fact that malkhut carries the pure divinity (eyn sof ) that enables her to rectify the world. In a Christological vein, one that Koppel surely did not entertain, it is through death that the messiah/Christ overcomes death, but it is just as important that God is revealed in God’s death in the lowly suffering of human tragedy (crucifixion). While kenosis, as the foundation of Christology, does specific things with the humility of Christ/God, Koppel’s notion of the emptiness of malkhut as a sign of an “incarnation” of eyn sof into the world that can facilitate, through the zaddik, the rectification of the world, offers a specifically Jewish kenotic interpretation of the revelation of God and the redemptive process. This state of malkhut also has to do with the fact that she contains a dimension of eyn sof that the upper sefirot do not have, that she is not a product of emanation but rather, like a candle igniting another candle, she receives an undiminished dimension from her source (hence, for malkhut, there is no distinction between her essence and her outer vessel, distinctions in general being a consequence of emanation). Koppel may have described her as being crushed but not broken, a distinction never explained further in Sha’arei Gan Eden, because she contains the undiminished eyn sof that cannot be permanently damaged, and for precisely this reason she can descend undiminished into the broken world. In Sha’arei Gan Eden this was all happening in the cosmic realm. For Hasidism (and Sabbateanism) the operative question is: who embodies this malkhut in this world?118 In the beginning of his discourse on malkhut, Koppel likens malkhut to the “righteous in Israel.” He explains that it is “because malkhut completes [mishalemet] the ten [sefirot] of all righteous Israelites [emunei Yisrael ].”119 Later he develops this in a more nuanced way. In the Lurianic system the cosmic rupture is read into the Torah through the death of the eight kings in Genesis 36:31–39. Luria and his disciples made much of the names of these kings and their deaths as a source of the world’s broken state. Koppel took issue with Luria on the question of the eighth king, Hadar (Gen. 36:39), who Koppel argued represents malkhut. The eighth king called Hadar is the secret of pri etz hadar [the etrog or citron fruit used as part of the four species on Sukkot] [Lev. 23:40] as malkhut. King David represents this as well. Hence it is written about King David that he is “alive and existent” [hai ve-kayam] [b.T. Rosh ha-Shana 25a, Zohar 1.192b].

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This is why the Torah does not mention the death of the eighth king, as the ­Zohar notes. This is called “a living God” [el hai] and is called “eternal life” [hai ­olamim] [Zohar 1.82b, cf. 3.245]. Yesod is called “alive” [hai] as the Torah calls Benaiah ben Jehoiada “ben ish hai” [lit. “the son of a living man”] [II Sam. 23:20] as stated in the Zohar. It [yesod] is el hai and hai olamim because his life exists in two worlds. In the world of confusion, or tohu, before the rectification [tikkun] yesod had a little bit more life than the other sefirot above. This is also true in the rectified world [olam ha-tikkun]. But [only] malkhut is called hai ve-kayam meaning her vessel remains intact [kayam] and is not broken at all!120

Koppel went on to describe the rupture of the vessels as likened to the suffering of the righteous (zaddikim) whereby the body is broken in order to heal the soul. His rendering of the eight kings, however, was different from that of Luria, who suggested that the seventh king is malkhut and the eighth king, who does not die, is the “new light” (or hadash) that will only descend in the time of redemption. Koppel placed the unbroken and unblemished malkhut—the very malkhut that generates the zimzum and contains eyn sof within it—in this world and not in the messianic future as the catalyst that facilitates the end time. For Koppel, Hadar represented the malkhut of this world, the zaddik ha-dor, or the messiah, who could “descend in order to ascend” and emerge unscathed because he carried eyn sof inside him. In this messianic figure is contained the eyn sof that humbles itself to enter world, a very kenotic rendering of the messianic process in Judaism. Koppel ended this part of his cosmology by citing the final verse (12:13) from Ecclesiastes, “The sum of the matter, when all is said and done.” He continued, “I explained everything clearly [even as] it did not cohere with how some of the earlier authorities understood it. In the end it will be proven that our words are truth, as it is written, ‘everything is tastefully good [be-tuv ta’am].’”121 The audacity of his posture notwithstanding, Koppel offered a rendering of malkhut that far exceeded the Zohar’s description of an empty vessel whose sustenance is dependent on received light from above (hence the use of malkhut/shekhina as the feminine). He offered a picture of the eternal zaddik, or messiah, as a figure who carries the eyn sof that humbles itself to descend into this world, our world, and not a figure to emerge only at the end time. Whether or not Tishby is correct that these and other similar references are culled from Nathan of Gaza’s Sabbateanism, here is a particular kind of ­zaddikism that to some extent reflects various early Hasidic texts such as Moshe Hayyim Ephraim of Sudilkov’s Degel Mahane Ephraim, Shneur Z ­ alman

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of Liady’s notion of the zaddik gamur (perfect zaddik) in Sefer ha-Tanya and subsequent Habad literature, the self-fashioning of Nahman of Bratslav as the sui generis zaddik in his Likutei Moharan, the popular zaddikism in ­Elimelech of Lizhensk’s Noam Elimelech, and Kalonymous Kalman Shapiro’s Meor ­ve-­Shemesh.122 It may also have influenced the Hasidic rendition of “descent for the sake of ascent” that some have relegated to Sabbatean influence.123 ­Finally, the notion of malkhut more generally as originating in, the receptacle for, and actually containing eyn sof may play a role in the Hasidic notion of hallowing the profane and its accompanying corporeal worship (avodah she-begashmiut) that became popular in Hasidic circles and many later interpreters of Hasidism such as Martin Buber.124 One of the salient characteristics of early Hasidism is the way it negotiated the radically transcendent eyn sof of earlier Kabbalah with its desire to foster worship founded on the principle of divine immanence. While some of this proximate worship may already have been embedded in certain strains of ­Lurianism (perhaps in Luria’s own writings), it blossomed more explicitly in the early Hasidic teachings of the Baal Shem Tov.125 We know that K ­ oppel’s Sha’arei Gan Eden was widely read in Hasidic intellectual circles, in part because of an apocryphal comment that the Besht had read and admired the work. Moreover, it seems possible that Koppel may have provided a ­kabbalistic/­metaphysical frame—a particular rendering of Lurianic teaching— through which Hasidism’s innovative ideas would develop. Koppel’s kenotic rendering of malkhut, only a small portion of which has been explored here, may be a crucial link between the more metaphysically transcendent eyn sof of ­Lurianism and the proximate (and perhaps incarnational) notion of eyn sof in creation—in this case, through the zaddik, who carries the origin of creation in his bones. Moreover, it may have facilitated the move from the zaddik as yesod to the zaddik as malkhut in Hasidic zaddikism, a move that cultivated a stronger tie between the Hasidic zaddik and its messianic implications.126 In addition it may point to a certain dimension of similitude between the Hasidic doctrine of the zaddik and kenotic Christology.

VI

The centrality of the zaddik is Hasidism’s most innovative and controversial contribution to Jewish theology. Much has been written about the social origins and ramifications of this innovation.127 While there are surely social reasons behind this shift of emphasis from text to person in eighteenth-century

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Eastern Europe, it is also significant to note that the early Hasidic masters, not unlike their non-Hasidic counterparts, were primarily invested in close study of the Jewish mystical tradition, and thus these societal revolutions, while perhaps answering a popular need, also had deep metaphysical roots.128 While the literature that anchored Hasidism included classical Kabbalah, scholars such as Tishby and Liebes have noticed the ways in which Sabbatean literature seeped into the consciousness of early Hasidic—and non-Hasidic—mysticism through texts that, while perhaps not overtly Sabbatean, illustrate iterations of Sabbatean metaphysics.129 It should also be considered how this form of pietism, arising beyond the modern Christian gaze, exhibited a close affinity to Christianity on the very ideas they once shared. Since Ya’akov Koppel’s Sha’arei Gan Eden and Kol Ya’akov were widely read and well regarded among the early Hasidic elite, it is certainly plausible to argue that his rendition of malkhut may have had an impact on the Hasidic notion of the zaddik that became a new way of negotiating the radical messianism of Sabbateanism without abandoning the linkage between the zaddik and the messianic figure. Resulting in a new form of messianic thinking, the zaddik as malkhut and a kenotic rendering of malkhut with subtle incarnational resonances may have brought into the mainstream the zaddik/messiah dichotomy that took new form in the early Hasidic messianism of Nahman of Bratslav, zaddikism in classical texts such as Noam Elimelekh and Meor ve-Shemesh, and messianic interpretations of the zaddik gamur in Shneur Zalman of Liady’s Sefer ha-Tanya.130 This idea took an even more radical form in the contemporary Hasidic messianism of Menahem Mendel Schneerson of Habad.131 The Sabbatean link, defanged and severed from the overt identification of Sabbatai Zevi as messiah, arguably played a crucial role in the Hasidic doctrine of the zaddik, filtered in part through Koppel’s work, the origins of which may be more complicated than initially imagined. This chapter has called attention to another dimension of Koppel’s thinking, his kenotic rendering of the zaddik as the carrier of the humbled and empty malkhut that carries the fullness of God (eyn sof), whose presence in the world enables the redemptive process to unfold. While in normative Judaism descent for the sake of ascent is a potent Sabbatean doctrine with roots in the Lurianic tradition and normalized in Hasidic literature, it also has roots in New Testament Christology, to wit, “he who descended is the very one who ascended” (Eph. 4:10). This may also suggest the descent of God to the lowest rung of human experience, death, in the kenotic hymn in Philippians 2. But what kind

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of redemption is intended when the redeemer is empty of the divine (malkhut) precisely by being full of it (eyn sof )? Here kenosis as the foundation of Christology offers some interesting possibilities. Philippians 2 suggests two salient features of early Christology: divine descent to earth and divine/human death in the God-Man Christ. Divine descent as the trajectory of revelation or prophecy (Ezek. 1:15–28) and “He bent the heavens and came down” (Ps. 18:10) and death as a motif of mystical experience and divine disclosure resonate in the Jewish tradition as well. The latter became quite prominent in Lurianic near-death performative rituals to simulate the liberation of the soul and thus facilitate the mystical experience.132 In Judaism, as Kabbalah increasingly became a central part of the normative tradition, these motifs remained somewhat tempered and have often been veiled in orthodox nomenclature. In Koppel, however, there is a sharp deviation from that trajectory—one he admitted was a new interpretation— which disclosed a kenotic rendering of malkhut that was then linked to the zaddik (messiah). This chapter ends with a reflection on a short meditation by Julia Kristeva in This Incredible Need to Believe on the implication of kenosis for the experience of human suffering and what she calls the transition from the religious to the sacred. We make no pretense of any direct connection between Kristeva and Kabbalah, and certainly not to Koppel, but suggest that Kristeva’s psychoanalytic interpretation of kenosis as the liberation of human suffering by drawing God into that suffering, thus making suffering itself an act of divine emulation (not ascetic suffering but psychological suffering), may serve as a lens through which to examine the implications of Koppel’s kenotic reading of God in malkhut and the Hasidic zaddik. Following New Testament scholarship but from a psychoanalytic perspective, Kristeva suggests that kenosis denotes a suffering, and even death, of God. The notion of divine descent exemplified in kenosis matches the human experience of emptiness and uselessness. Among other things, this has a liberating effect on the human condition. Kristeva cites Nietzsche, who wrote in The Antichrist that kenosis gives the human and divine death on the cross, “this freedom, this sovereign detachment [which places suffering] above any kind of resentment.”133 For Kristeva, the great cathartic power in Christianity is precisely its recognition of suffering as that which the human and the divine share equally. Recent scholarship has focused on the suffering of God in Jewish sources, illustrated in midrashic and kabbalistic renderings that do

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not go as far as kenosis in Philippians 2 but seem sympathetic to that trajectory.134 God suffers with the suffering Israel; God suffers God’s choice to cause Israel’s suffering. Kristeva takes this in a different direction, redemptive in nature, suggesting that the suffering and death of the human/God in kenosis is “the beautiful return to the consciousness of rebeginning.” But what is the “rebeginning”? It functions for her in some way as the antithesis of Song of Songs. Whereas Song of Songs offers us the eroticization of the divine, and human, longing and desire, the Eros that keeps Israel waiting and hoping for a vision of the maiden’s beauty, “the sovereign suffering [of kenosis], paradoxically, is an emptying of passion: it de-eroticizes suffering.”135 Kristeva posits that “even through this co-presence of the absolute-and-the-nothingness of desire” we reach the end of the “religious” (longing to be redeemed) and stand at the entrance to the “sacred,” which she describes as “a traversal, via thought, of the unthinkable: nothingness, the useless, the vain, the absurd.”136 But this “unthinkable” is not nihilistic; rather, it is the very nature of the divine. But how does this kenotic experience offer a rebeginning, that is, a rectification of the tragedy of the first beginning? That is, how is kenosis redemptive? Human experience, Kristeva posits, is “a long ‘work on the negative’: birth, weaning, separation, frustration.”137 Here, perhaps, the negation that is often the mystic’s experience of God and the negation that is the center of the human experience of the human merge in Kristeva’s rendering of kenosis. Wolfson offers a felicitous and succinct description of the mystical experience and negation: “God’s presence is experienced as absence, that is, consciousness of God as negation is the core of the mystical experience.”138 Koppel’s claim that the zoharic emptiness of malkhut is actually the fullness, perhaps even disclosure, of God (eyn sof ) that is, that God is revealed in the negation of God, a notion that both liberates the individual from the alienation of suffering (while not alleviating suffering) and de-eroticizes the unconsummated desire of Song of Songs. Here Meister Eckhart’s prayer that God liberate him from God begins to resonate. The desire for the beloved Other “is suddenly revealed to be empty, vain, useless, absurd.” It is precisely this realization, Kristeva says, where the sacred replaces the religious. Koppel does not give us a God who is Nichts, pace Meister Eckhart, nor a freedom from God, pace Nietzsche, but rather a God whose very revelation, and thus accessibility, is in the emptiness of malkhut as the carrier of eyn sof ; malkhut is empty precisely in that it is full.

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Wolfson’s thesis on the secret of messianism in contemporary Habad is a good place to conclude. Toward the end of a detailed analysis of Habad literature on the concept of the messiah, he remarks, In my judgment, Schneerson was intentionally ambiguous about his own identity as Messiah, since the key aspect of his teaching involves cultivating a modification in consciousness with respect to this very issue. Simply put, the image of the personal Messiah may have been utilized rhetorically to liberate one from the belief in the personal Messiah. . . . From this slant, the pledge about the messianic future is invariably a put on, the putting off of what is forthcoming. At the most extreme, one might be tempted to think of the eschatological drama as a cover-up, a dogmatic cloak in which to envelop the truth that there is no Messiah for whom we must wait.139

Wolfson’s conclusions are based on his reading of Habad Hasidism in particular and Kabbalah more generally. Still, one can’t help wonder whether this notion of the revealed secret—the secret that what is promised is the emptiness of the promise—is not dissimilar from Kristeva’s rebeginning, that is, the finality of suffering is not its erasure but to know that God suffers too. Redemption qua liberation is embedded in that realization. Put otherwise, Koppel’s malkhut as eyn sof is the disclosure that the experience of divine absence is the final stage of disclosure. This strays far from Koppel’s innovative rendering of malkhut. If one considers Kristeva’s use of kenosis to suggest that the divine itself is divine precisely because it suffers, however, invoking Koppel that eyn sof is embedded in the lowest place in human experience, malkhut—or in Christology, the humiliation of the crucifixion, or cruciform God—we have a depiction of the zaddik/messiah, the redeemer, who offers a rebeginning of God-consciousness that liberates, even redeems, without erasing the emptiness that lies at the core of human experience.

5

“BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?” Reflections on Jesus in Martin Buber and the Hasidic Master Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev Woe unto us if we begin with false messianism. Judah Magnus, letter to Joseph Klausner But a Messiah is necessary—in order for him not to come. David Ben-Gurion, “Divrei Sofrim” Revelation is not legislation. I hope I would be prepared to die for this postulate if I were faced with a Jewish universal church that had inquisitorial powers. Martin Buber, letter to Franz Rosenzweig

I In previous chapters I examined various aspects of Christianity and their correlates in Hasidic spirituality. This chapter treats the central aspect of Christianity, the figure and status of Jesus. While Judaism does not have anything that corresponds directly with the figure of Jesus (although structurally some aspects come quite close), throughout their history Jews have grappled with how to understand Jesus from a Jewish perspective; that is, because he lived and died as a Jew and professed Judaism, yet subsequently became the pillar of another competing religion, how should Jews relate to him? Throughout the Middle Ages and into early modernity, Jesus was viewed by Jews in a wholly negative light. Much of this was inspired by the anonymous medieval tract Toldot Yeshu, which depicted Jesus as the bastard child of a Roman solider and a Jewish mother, a shameless magician and charlatan.1 In recent years there has been renewed interest in the role of Jesus in the formation of Judaism.2 Much of this recent interest in Jesus has precedent in earlier Jewish adaptations of the search for the historical Jesus in nineteenth-century Germany and also reflects the present-day interest in ecumenism and the influence of Jewish studies in the American academy.3 While Jews often look to I. M. Jost, Abraham Geiger, and Joseph Salvador as devising the first sustained modern Jewish studies of Jesus, Baruch Spinoza may have been the first modern

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Jew to write extensively about him, notably comparing Jesus with Moses in his Theologico-Political Treatise.4 Although it would be a stretch to say Spinoza was the beginning of the Jewish Jesus idea among Jews, his invocation of Jesus in the context of his Jewish reflections on the Bible prepared the soil for what would become a more sustained examination of Jesus and his role in the formation of modern Judaism. It is not a coincidence that Martin Buber, who had undying respect for Spinoza and also wrote extensively about Jesus, noted in a Spinozistic spirit that Moses “had a genius which could find its parallel only in Jesus.”5 With the rise of the search for the historical Jesus among liberal German Protestants in the nineteenth century—most of whom were looking for a depiction of Jesus outside formal Christology—Jewish historians, rabbis, and philosophers in Europe, America, and later in Mandate Palestine wrote about Jesus as a Jew and about the figure of Jesus as a model for Jewish teaching and piety.6 Europeans such as Geiger and Henrich Graetz, functioning as both historians and theologians, used the historical Jesus as a polemical tool to argue for emancipation, in Geiger’s case claiming that Judaism (Reform Judaism in particular) is the religion of Jesus while Christianity is the religion about him. In America, Isaac Mayer Wise, Emil Hirsch, Kaufmann Kohler, and later Stephen Wise, Gershon Enelow, and Sholom Asch wrote about the Jewish Jesus, less as a formal polemic against Christianity (although often not very sympathetic to Christianity) and more an expression of the ongoing project of acculturation and Americanization.7 Jesus was the subject of numerous studies in Palestine and later Israel, most prominently in Joseph Klausner’s controversial Jesus of Nazareth: His Life and Times and what became known as the “Brenner Affair,” a raucous debate in 1911 between Joseph Brenner and Ahad ha-Am about the conversions of Jews to Christianity in Russia.8 The affair pitted Zionist intellectuals against one another on the question of whether Jesus should be considered part of the new canon of Hebrew/Zionist heroes.9 In Europe, America, and Israel, Jesus was fashioned as distinct from Christianity. In fact, much of the work was geared precisely to separate Jesus from Christianity, stressing his Jewishness, and using him as a prototype for the Judaism being espoused by the author, i.e., as the prototype of the modern Reform Jew or a proto-Zionist. Of all modern Jewish thinkers, Buber is perhaps best known for his writing about Jesus. While many Jews took up this topic after the initial polemical writings of Geiger and Graetz, Buber’s open-mindedness extended beyond even the more sympathetic portrayals of Jesus in Stephen Wise, Gerson Enelow, and

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Joseph Klausner. More importantly, Buber was one of the most vocal in calling for Jesus’s teachings, as presented in the New Testament, to play a central role in a systemic critique of Judaism and call for its renewal. For Buber, Jesus was not simply an exemplar of pure Pharisaism before its corruption, he was one whose only parallel was Moses (here he reiterates Spinoza), one who had the potential “to return to the original purity of revelation.”10 While much has been written about Buber’s Jesus, no one has made the connection between Buber’s portrayal of Jesus and that of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. The focus here is specifically on Buber’s theory that Jesus was an internal critic of Judaism in a line that culminated in the Baal Shem Tov and, by implication, perhaps even Buber himself. That is, I argue that Buber drew a link between Jesus and the Baal Shem Tov (both decidedly Buberian creations), viewing the latter as a recapitulation, and correction, of the former, one who created the conditions for the final overcoming of “religion” and the return to an unmediated revelatory I-Thou relationship between the human and God and, by extension, the human and the world. Jesus appeared in many of Buber’s essays as well as his monograph Two Types of Faith, a detailed analysis of the differences between Judaism and Christianity.11 Written in the mid-1940s, first published in German in 1950, and translated into English in 1951, Two Types of Faith exhibited Buber’s lifelong interest in the New Testament. He develops an affinity between Jesus and his interest in devotio (addressing God) versus sacrament (sometimes also called “religion”), an idea that stands at the very center of his work on Hasidism. His oft-quoted quip in that work that Jesus is “my great brother”12 has circulated over the decades as both a celebration of Buber’s ecumenicism and a critique of him as a closet Christian.13 It is not insignificant that his book I and Thou was first translated by a Christian and in its early years was more popular among Christian readers than Jews. Colleagues such as Leo Baeck and Franz Rosenzweig also wrote extensively on Christianity, but neither focused on the figure of Jesus as did Buber.14 While Jesus did appear in their work, it was mostly in order to distinguish him from Christianity (a notion that existed from the time of Geiger) and not an attempt to portray him as a model for contemporary spirituality. While Buber was also explicit about his belief that Christianity had misunderstood Jesus,15 he did so with deep affection for Jesus as one who informed his own spiritual life.16 Our interest in Buber’s Jesus in this chapter is comparative in nature. Although Two Types of Faith was published relatively late in Buber’s career (he died in 1965), his fascination with Jesus can be seen in his earlier work as well, par-

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ticularly in his early work on Hasidism. Below, Buber’s position on Jesus is juxtaposed with that of Rabbi Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev, a Hasidic master who lived in Poland during the same decades Buber’s work was taking form. Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev (1856–1926) was born in Kotzk, a village near Lublin, Poland, in 1856, the son of Rabbi Avraham Bornstein, a leader of Polish Jewry, author of the influential collections of rabbinic responsa, Avnei Nezer and Iglei Tal,17 and son-in-law of the celebrated Hasidic rebbe of Kotzk, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Morgenstern. Shmuel Bornstein assumed the position of posek (legal decisor) and rebbe of Sochaczev upon the death of his father in 1910. His collected Hasidic teachings were published in a multivolume format under the title Shem me-Shmuel. These teachings are a classic example of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Polish Hasidism. Uncharacteristic of Hasidic literature, Bornstein mentioned Jesus (never by name, only by the traditional code name oto ha-ish, or that man), sometimes under the veil of referring to oto ha-ish as Esau (Esau was traditionally understood to be the patriarch of Edom, the empire of Christendom), and offered some novel interpretations of his life and role in the ultimate redemption.18 Bornstein was no freethinker. As a Hasidic master he was fully absorbed in the traditional depiction of Jesus as “the defiled one,” even a demonic figure, as portrayed in the anonymous Toldot Yeshu and later literature. The biblical Esau was a clear reference to Christianity which had, from the rabbinic period onward, been linked to the empire of Esau/Edom.19 Deploying the zoharic and later Lurianic (and Sabbatean) notion that defilement itself may play a crucial role in redemption, Bornstein posited that Jesus’s (historical/mythic) demise may have created conditions for the unfolding of redemption. Whether Jesus here was a guise for Hasidism more generally, or whether Hasidism was a corrective for Jesus’s wayward journey, as it is explicitly in Buber, is hard to know. Hasidic literature is rarely forthcoming in that way, remaining in the more comfortable arena of biblical exegesis. Yet we do know that polemical battles were being fought in this literature, and that unusual sightings, such as Jesus’s frequent appearance in a Hasidic text, were cause for closer examination and speculation. While we cannot know with any certainty what, if anything, Jesus, as oto ha-ish, meant in Bornstein’s writings, I explore the idiosyncratic use of Jesus as a hermeneutical trope in light of Buber’s more overt analysis. None of this suggests that Buber or Bornstein had any intimate knowledge of the other’s work, although Buber likely knew of Bornstein through the latter’s study of Hasidism. Buber’s Jesus clearly emerges from his modern sensibilities

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and his attempt to view Judaism and Christianity as both holding the requisite teachings to bring the human to a state of devotio and meeting with God as “Thou” that serves as his ultimate goal. Bornstein’s Jesus is a demonic figure, a gilgul (reincarnation) of Esau, and the embodiment of defilement (tumah). He mirrors depictions in classical Jewish literature. And yet, there remains something odd about Bornstein’s Jesus that begs interpretation. For Buber, Jesus initiates a process that is lost in both Christianity and Judaism and is then revived in a different form in modern Hasidism.20 Modern— that is, Buber’s—Hasidism becomes the path returning us to Jesus’s original message before it was buried in Pauline doctrine and rejected in toto by Rabbinic Judaism.21 On Paul, Buber echoed many before him when he wrote, The periods of Christian theology can be classified according to the degree in which they are dominated by Paulinism, by which we mean of course not just a system of thought, but a mode of seeing and being that dwells in the life itself. . . . In the human life of our day, compared with earlier epochs, Christianity is receding, but the Pauline view and attitude is gaining the mastery in many circles outside that of Christianity . . . like Paul man experiences the world as given into the hands of inevitable forces, and only the manifest will to redemption from above, only Christ is missing.22

One wonders who those “outside Christianity” may be. Could they be ultraOrthodox “rabbinites,” religious and even some secular Zionists who are making messianism the centerpiece of their ideology?23 Whoever they are, the Paulinists (Christian and non-Christian) rob the individual of the power to address God from an experiential place of devotion and largely abandon the world to divine fiat. For Buber the world (by which he meant the West) is stuck in the unproductive cycle of “religion.” The Baal Shem Tov, carrying Jesus’s lost message, holds the key to change direction. For Bornstein, Jesus is the embodiment of the kelippot (unholy husks). Yet in that capacity he plays a crucial role in purifying Israel. In fact without him Israel could not be redeemed.

II Anyone familiar with the Jewish writings on the Jewish Jesus in modernity will quickly recognize that Buber’s writings on Jesus largely revisited ideas that predated his own by half a century. Yet one still feels he was saying something different. This may be because Buber was a kind of bridge figure. He was not coming from the pre- or even post-emancipatory European theater, where the

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Jewish Jesus was a polemic tool against Christianity. Nor was he coming from the American context, where the Jewish Jesus is a tool of Americanization, expressed perhaps most strikingly by Isaac Mayer Wise, who suggested that the American Christian would come to recognize that everything that is true about Christianity is Jewish and everything that is not Jewish about Christianity is false.24 Jesus also played almost no role in Buber’s Zionist writings, although, as Donald Berry argues, he did believe that “the revival of Jewish life in the ancient homeland Israel might be a mediating model community for fusing the spirit of east and west into a unity.”25 Aside from his writings specifically about Jesus (for example, Two Types of Faith), Buber mentioned Jesus most frequently in his writings on Hasidism. ­Jesus came as much to teach Jews where they had gone wrong as to teach Christians where they had strayed. Both errors, he claimed, are rooted in the rejection of Jesus: for Christians the gnosticization of Jesus, for Jews the repudiation of Jesus as a false messiah.26 Unlike that of many proponents of the Jewish Jesus, Buber’s approach was to use Jesus as a corrective to Judaism, not as a club to bludgeon Christianity. He ended his Two Types of Faith with the following declaration: The faith of Judaism and the faith of Christianity are by nature different in kind, each in conformity with its human basis, and they will indeed remain different, until mankind is gathered in from the exiles of the “religious” into the Kingdom of God. But an Israel striving after the renewal of its faith through the rebirth of the person and a Christianity striving for the renewal of its faith through the rebirth of nations would have something yet unsaid to say to each other and help to give to one another—hardly to be conceived at the present time.27

Herein lies Buber’s main point: Judaism abandoned the person for the collective and, in doing so, undermined the prophetic message that stands as the epicenter of devotio. And Christianity abandoned the nation in favor of the person but dehumanized the person by divinizing him, making him a sacrament instead of a model of human righteousness.28 Buber’s Jesus became the first in a series of persons to simultaneously challenge Paul’s Christology and rabbinic legalism; for Buber the two are structurally linked. Both robbed the individual of devotio by making religion about sacrament (Jesus or halakha/ Jewish law as mediators between the human and God). Buber plainly states that Jesus had his faults; he could not follow through because he saw himself too much in opposition to the Pharisees and abandoned the internal critique that might have saved them from a fate not dissimilar to the one Jesus’s disciples succumbed to a generation later.29 “Jesus misses the mark when he

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treats the Pharisees as people who close their eyes, and they [Pharisees/Jews] miss the mark when they treat him as one subject to hallucinations; neither party knows the inner reality of the other.”30 Not surprisingly, Buber used the same dichotomy of nation and person to explain why Hasidism failed to achieve the fulfillment of its vocation: precisely because it abandoned the message Jesus brought to the Jews. From this standpoint it may also be understood why Hasidism has produced what it has produced in just this way and not any other. The teaching of redemption that existed in it was so great that Hasidism could have developed into one of the great religions of redemption of the world, but the central importance of the national element has prevented it. Hasidism could not become the property of the whole of humanity because it could not aspire to the redemption of the world as the essential thing and to the redemption of Israel as merely a tiny part of the great redemption. It could not pass to humanity because it could not disconnect the redemption of the soul from the redemption of the nation.31

While Two Types of Faith focuses on the distinction between “believing in” (emunah) and “believing that” (pistis), not to distinguish Judaism from Christianity but to distinguish devotio from sacrament (or gnosis)—that is, both Judaism and Christianity—I think Buber’s real contribution lies elsewhere.32 He began by collapsing the polemical dichotomy between Judaism and Christianity, positing that the difference between them is essentially internal to Israelite religion. Indeed the constant danger of the form of faith which tends to the realization of a revealed divine will, is that the keeping of it can persist apart from the intended surrender to the divine will, and can even begin as such, which surrender can alone invest the attitude with meaning and thereby with its right. The beginnings of this process of making the gesture independent go back to the early times of the Sinai-religion. The struggle against it runs through the whole history of Israelite-Jewish faith.33

This of course is not new. In establishing the struggle between devotio and sacrament as an inner-Israelite struggle, however, he can then make his more audacious claim that modern Hasidism is an expression of devotio that is also reflected in part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.34 This is not to identify Jesus with Hasidism (really the Baal Shem Tov); it is to posit that they exist on a continuum and the Baal Shem Tov provides the corrective to Jesus that enables Jesus to re-enter contemporary Jewish discourse. While Hasidism appears

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p ­ eriodically in Two Types of Faith, Buber’s use of Jesus as a tool to present Hasidism’s innovative spirit and his use of Hasidism to re-introduce Jesus to the Jews comes through most prominently in two essays, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal Shem” and “Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis,” both reprinted in Buber’s The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism. “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal Shem” embodies what Amos Funkenstein decades later called counterhistory. David Biale, who popularized the term to describe the work of Gershom Scholem, defines it as follows. “By counter­history I mean the argument that the vital forces of Jewish history lie in the margins—in the subterranean, ignored and even despised traditions, further even from the center than the vox populi.”35 Buber used two modern exemplars of Jewish heresy, one that reached the larger world and one that remained confined to Jewish society. His goal was to present the Baal Shem Tov and Hasidism more generally as responding to these heretical teachings (in the first case unwittingly, in the second consciously), by taking from them what is authentic and expunging what is distorted to revive a biblical spirituality before it was corrupted by “religion.”36 While never saying so explicitly, Buber suggested that the seventeenth-century heretical philosopher Spinoza and his contemporary, the mystical heretic Sabbatai Zevi (Spinoza knew about Sabbatai although the reverse is likely not the case), embodied a bifurcation of authentic biblical belief (emunah) that Jesus represented, and that Buber believed the Baal Shem Tov could resolve. The two men mark a late exilic catastrophe in Judaism, Spinoza a catastrophe in spirit and in the influence of the Gentile nations, Sabbatai Zevi in life and in the inner structure . . . for as Sabbatai’s apostasy signified the historical placing in question of Jewish Messianism, so Spinoza’s teaching signified the historical placing in question of Jewish belief in God. Both thereby conducted to its conclusion a process which began with a single historical manifestation, with Jesus [italics added].37

It would be hasty, although not altogether mistaken, to surmise that this is simply a statement about Jewish heresy. Buber continues, “To both [Spinoza and Sabbatai Zevi] a new process provided the reply and the correction, a process which also began with a single historical manifestation, with that of the ­Baal-Shem-Tov” [italics added]. Repeating the locution referring to Jesus, “began with a single historical manifestation,” is no accident. Buber held that Jesus introduced one idea, given to the world in the form of messianism and to Israel

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in the form of a belief in the indwelling of God, who can be addressed in an unmediated way. While this idea stood at the center of the prophetic tradition, Buber claimed Jesus went further than the prophets, for whom the reconciliation between God and the human was relegated to some “indefinite future.”38 Jesus, Buber argued, claimed this reconciliation was available in the here and now, in Buber’s language “in the every day.”39 And it is Buber’s Baal Shem Tov, drawing the messianic idea back from the future to the self-­redemption of the everyday, who reiterates Jesus’s teaching inside the Jewish tradition.40 In accord with Spinoza Buber writes, “something of Judaism entered into the possession of the peoples, and what entered thus cannot be cut from its ­origin.” Gesturing to Jesus he continues, “Something from the innermost center of Israel, however modified, had once penetrated through Christianity into the Gentile world.” And then gesturing to the Baal Shem Tov he concludes, “It is of great significance that a Jew could teach men how to do away with it, and a Jew has done so.”41 What is this Hasidic corrective to Spinoza’s pantheism for Buber? It is the practical application that God is in the world and should be worshipped there, but God is not of the world. In short, Hasidism introduces the notion that the world is a sacrament. According to Buber, Spinoza was correct in placing God in the world, giving to the world an essentially Jewish idea, but he erred in his “view that there is no speech between God and man. From being the place of the meeting with God, the world becomes [for Spinoza] the place of God.”42 The Baal Shem Tov revived an old rabbinic adage, that God is the place of the world and He dwells in it, and added a practical component. “Through God’s indwelling in the world the world becomes—in general religious terms—a sacrament; it could not be such if it were the place of God [that is, God according to Spinoza]: only just this, that God transcends it yet dwells in it makes it a sacrament.”43 This idea is not new, but Buber presented it in a new way as the essential core of Hasidism. Spinoza went too far, making ­devotio impossible. “In the Hasidic message the separation between ‘life in God’ and ‘life in the world,’ the primal evil of all ‘religion,’ is overcome in genuine, concrete unity.”44 The Baal Shem Tov reigned in Spinoza without subverting Spinoza’s essential critique. All this, of course, was mediated through Buber’s idiosyncratic rendering of Hasidism. One could extend this further to say that the Baal Shem Tov in Buber’s essay was really Buber himself. Sabbatai Zevi brought the messiah to the world, but he and his disciples erred like Jesus’s disciples had done by making the messiah a differentiated person who became not a model of piety but an icon of veneration. What r­ uined

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messianism, for Buber, was the messiah. “Messianic self-disclosure is the bursting of Messiahship. . . . Whatever the appearance of Jesus means for the Gentile world, . . . seen from the standpoint of Judaism he is the first in a series of men who, stepping out of the hiddenness of the servant of the Lord, the real ‘Messianic mystery,’ acknowledged their Messiahship in their souls and in their words.”45 It was precisely Judaism, liberated from the “primal evil of religion” that produced rabbinism, which can save the messianic idea from its corruption in the messiah. The Hasidic message of redemption stands in opposition to the Messianic selfdifferentiation of one man from other men, of one time from other times, of one act from other actions. All mankind is accorded the co-working power, all time is directly redemptive, all action for the sake of God may be Messianic action. . . . The self-differentiation, the reflexion of man to a Messianic superiority of this person, of this hour, of this action, destroys the unpremeditated quality of the act.46

Setting aside the unhistorical nature of Buber’s claim about Hasidism more generally and Hasidic messianism in particular, his point here was to posit that Jesus (constructed according to the popular rendition of the Jewish Jesus) was the first of many to introduce a notion of devotio based on the principle that God is deeply embedded in the world while not limited to the world, and a notion of messiah as an act of human aspiration and self-redemption that was corrupted in the primal evil of religion in subsequent Judaism and Christianity.47 In modernity, Spinoza and Sabbatai Zevi embody two dimensions of an idea introduced by Jesus but later corrupted by his disciples so as to make any attempt at unity impossible. For Buber it was the Baal Shem Tov who unwittingly replied and corrected both Spinoza and Sabbatai Zevi, ultimately bringing back Jesus’s message that was lost in the centuries of “religion.” Buber’s “Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis” was first published as “Christus, Chassidismus, Gnosis, Einege Bemerkungen,” in 1954 as a response to Rudolph ­Pannwitz’s essay “Der Chassidismus,” which criticized Buber’s work on Hasidism. Pannwitz claimed that Buber was denigrating Christianity by personalizing Jesus, making him a kind of precursor to Hasidism and thus relegating Christianity to a distortion of Jesus’s teaching. This concerns us here because Buber reiterated numerous points made earlier, now focusing more specifically on the question of gnosis—defined here simultaneously as the mysteriousness of  Christ’s divinity and the mystery of kabbalistic knowledge—as a distor-

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tion of Jesus’s more authentic biblical teaching of devotio that is embodied in ­Hasi­dism’s marginalization of kabbalistic theologumena. Buber essentially agreed with Pannwitz’s distinction between “the founder Christ” and the “Jewish Christ” but suggested that whereas the former is really “an image sketched by the Johannine gnosis that since has been passed with a great part of Christendom as that of its founder,” the “Jewish Christ” is the man himself who “preserves in immediacy with God, the great devotio.” He is not the prophet of some gnostic apocalyptic but one who teaches how to live in the midst of that destruction. The Jewish Christ teaches “emunah, trust, as the prophets called it. He who taught his followers to say ‘Our Father’ could not give an account of himself as an ‘autarchic soul.’ He has no share in the kosmos atheos of the modern gnostic and just no place at all therein where he can lay his head.”48 More pointedly, in I and Thou, Buber cited Jesus as the one who was able most fully to establish the primal “I-Thou” relation.49 But, Buber stated emphatically, this adaptation of the Jewish Christ was not meant to denigrate Christianity any more than it was to denigrate Judaism’s (here specifically Kabbalah’s) use of gnosis as a way to bury the devotio of the prophets. “What is evil is not the mythicization of reality that brings the inexpressible to speech but the gnosticization of myth that tears it out of the historical-biographical ground in which it took root.”50 Early in his career Buber wrote that “Hasidism is the Kabbala become ethos.”51 In “Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis” he returned to that claim to suggest that “ethos” is essentially devotio, addressing God through this world by “hallowing the everyday.”52 This devotio is the practical application of what he called elsewhere emunah (contrary to pistis), the central teaching of both Jesus and the Baal Shem Tov. In Christianity, gnosis (the founder Christ) gives us religion but in doing so elides Jesus’s message, and in Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah gives us gnosis, creating a mysterious theologumenon that Buber pejoratively called the “gnosticization of myth.” For our purposes what is important is the way Buber’s rendering of Hasidism cannot be properly understood without his work on Jesus. While not explicitly equating Jesus with the Baal Shem Tov, he was suggesting that what Hasidism brings to contemporary Judaism—again, understood exclusively through Buber’s tinted lenses—is part of a longer ­counter-historical trajectory that extends at least as far back as Jesus. By accepting Buber’s Hasidism, one cannot but accept his Jewish Jesus. To reject both, for him, would be to continue the corruption called “religion” that has plagued both Judaism and Christianity from their very beginnings.

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In some sense then, Buber was asking Jews to reconsider Jesus in light of Hasidism’s corrective of him; that is, to view Jesus positively through the cipher of the Baal Shem Tov. This reconsideration—according to what Buber determined were Jesus’s authentic sayings in the Synoptic Gospels—facilitated the return of the true biblical message of trust (emunah) as opposed to doctrine. He was asking Christians to reconsider Jesus (and Judaism) again, this time not through Reform Judaism but through Hasidism, an authentic lived Judaism stripped of its religion (law) and its gnosis (Kabbalah) and reaching back to the great teacher of “I and Thou” in the first century CE.53 The fact that Jesus plays no role in Hasidic literature should come as no surprise. How then can Buber’s Hasidism contribute anything to his goal of mutual recognition and respect? How can Hasidism now be a lens for the reconsideration of Jesus? Below is an examination of numerous references to Jesus in the writings of one early twentieth-century Hasidic master from Poland. While far from providing a foundation for Buber’s thesis, Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev offered an interesting rendering of Jesus founded on kabbalistic metaphysics that suggests something a bit more complicated than the demonic Jesus canonized in Toldot Yeshu and disseminated throughout the traditional Jewish world.

III Turning to the Hasidic work of Shmuel Bornstein, known by the title of his collected teachings, Shem me-Shmuel, we find a very different sentiment. There is no enlightened openness to either Jesus or Christianity. The sources Bornstein used were exclusively classical rabbinic (halakhic and midrashic) and kabbalistic literature. Bornstein would surely never have accepted Buber’s comment that “Jesus is my brother.” Yet for Bornstein Jesus was a brother of sorts; he was an evil brother, a gilgul (reincarnation) of Esau (Jacob’s brother) who, as a brother, could absorb all the tumah (spiritual defilement) that was contained in Israel as a result of its encounter with Hellenism in the Second Temple period and, by extension, help Israel prepare itself for redemption. ­Buber’s “brother” was needed not only to prove that Jesus was a Jew and that Judaism was the religion of Jesus (as opposed to Christianity, which was the religion about him) but more importantly to present the spiritual progeny of Jesus-like figures—the Baal Shem Tov and perhaps Buber himself—as part of a long history of spiritual heroes. Bornstein also needed Jesus but for very different purposes. For him Jesus was surely not Buber’s mentor but he was a “brother” nonetheless.

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Reference to Jesus in rabbinic literature is a complex matter and beyond the scope of this essay.54 Suffice it to say that the rabbis of late antiquity did not live under Christendom, and those who lived before Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 which lifted the persecution of Christians or Emperor Theodosius’s decree in 380 making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire likely knew little about Christianity. At most they may have been aware of scattered Jewish-Christian communities nearby. In the later rabbinic period, fifth- to sixth-century Babylonia, the rabbis likely had some access to Gospel literature and took Christianity very seriously, but they had little more than a cursory knowledge.55 Jesus of Nazareth, the focus of the Gospels, was never mentioned by name in rabbinic literature.56 There were, however, numerous references to unknown heretical figures such as Jesus ben Pantera/Pandera or ben Stada.57 Scholars argue whether these may be veiled references to Jesus of Nazareth.58 The rabbis wove fantasies of these figures’ illicit sexual relations and blasphemous behavior that were later compiled, edited, and presented in narrative form in an anonymous work, Toldot Yeshu (The Generations of Yeshu, or Jesus), most likely written some time in the sixth century. Most Jews in Bornstein’s milieu considered Toldot Yeshu to be an authentic depiction of Jesus, presenting him as the illegitimate son of Mary/Miriam and a wayward Roman soldier who was guilty of magic and blasphemy.59 In later centuries, when Jews living under Christendom became more familiar with Christianity, more elaborate stories and polemical positions were constructed, in some cases building on earlier midrashic accounts.60 In the formative period of Kabbalah in the Middle Ages, Jesus took on a demonic form, a force of evil trying to destroy the Jews.61 Not unlike similar accounts of the demonic Lilith, the mythical first wife of Adam, it was said that Jesus still wielded power after his death, especially on the eve of his birthday, Christmas. A custom evolved for Jews to refrain from Torah study on Christmas Eve, called in Jewish literature Nittel Nacht.62 Responsa literature gives many reasons for this custom, including keeping Jews off the street on a night when anti-­Jewish behavior, sparked by the age-old belief in Jewish deicide, might occur. For the more mystically or imaginatively inclined, refraining from Torah study on Christmas served to prevent the mythic Jesus, who, according to some sources, rises from his eternal damnation to wreak havoc on the Jews who rejected him, from utilizing the holiness of Torah for demonic purposes.63 In traditional Jewish societies Jesus’s name is not mentioned; the name itself is believed to

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e­ mbody demonic power. Instead he is referred to simply as oto ha-ish (that man) or, in Yiddish, der Toyleh (the hanged one). Rabbinic literature makes a connection between three interlocking tropes: Esau, the villainous brother of Jacob in Genesis; Edom, the ancient people cum empire that persecuted the Israelites/Jews;64 and Christianity, the religion of the Roman Empire after Constantine. These three points—the prohibition against using the name of Jesus, Nittel Nacht, and Esau / Edom / Christianity— all played a role in Bornstein’s texts on Jesus, two of which relate specifically to Nittel Nacht and the third, which is a midrashic rendering of the biblical Joseph as having the power to undermine the forces of Esau. The third text makes curious use of the term oto ha-ish, usually referring to Jesus, as a reference to Esau. That it originated in Midrash but was not common in Hasidic literature may suggest that what is really being discussed is not only Esau and Joseph but Christians and Jews. The context for the following text is the second night of Hanukkah, which often falls during the Torah portion known as mi-ketz, part of the long Joseph narrative toward the end of Genesis. It is known from Lurianic writings that “that man” was the reincarnation of Esau.65 Hence the Edomites first attached themselves to him.66 Afterward some Jews also followed. It appears that all of them [the Jews that followed Jesus] were [or had] remnants of the poison of the Greeks. They separated from the rest of Israel through the Edomites, who separated from Israel. A metaphor for this would be one who wishes to purify silver. In order to remove the extraneous matter one must add other kinds of extraneous matter to the mix [e.g., copper] in order that the extraneous matter in the silver will find and attach itself to the external matter [min be-mino] and they both will be separated from the silver through fire. This can be likened to the Edomites: when they intentionally tried to destroy Israel they found [in them] their own kind [min et mino]. That is, the Edomites found poisonous remnants in Israel that were left over from the Greeks. All this extraneous matter [the Edomites and the Greek remnants in ­Israel] attached themselves to Jesus. As a result Israel became like pure silver. And Jesus was punished [in Gehenna] with boiling excrement [b.T. Gittin 57a/b], which serves as a metaphor for the discarded poisonous matter that attached themselves to him. Perhaps this all offers a reason why Israel must desist from studying Torah every year on the day of Jesus’s birth. The Torah [has the power] to distance

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the extraneous forces [hizonim], as it is written, “Behold, My word is like fire, says the LORD” (Jer. 23:29). Fire purifies silver and burns out all the extraneous matter, leaving its husks [kelippah] with no strength to expand its influence [­lehitpashet]. They are prevented from expanding because of the power of ­Torah. Therefore, when we desist from studying Torah [on Christmas Eve] we give the kelippah the place to expand in order to absorb the poison. Through this [absorption] Israel will slowly be fixed until the Messiah comes.67

Bornstein’s comments live fully within the rabbinic depiction of Jesus as a demonic force fortified by the Lurianic depiction of him as the gilgul, or reincarnation, of Esau.68 The Edomites seem to have referred to the Greeks and not the Romans (these kinds of distinctions are not of much concern in Hasidic exegesis), and the Jews referred to the Jews who followed Jesus during or immediately after his ministry. Bornstein got the chronology a bit wrong; it was the Jews who were Jesus’s first disciples and only later, through Paul, did the Church spread to Hellenistic society, but this was also not a concern for him. Or perhaps he was talking as well about the increased instances of Jews converting to Christianity in Germany and Russia in the later decades of the nineteenth century, though there is no evidence to support this.69 In any case, Bornstein’s point was that there was a reason why Jesus was attractive to both Greeks and Jews: Jesus was the gilgul of Jacob’s brother Esau (forerunner of the Edomite kingdom), who was defiled and separated from Israel but also brought with him some of the holiness of Israel (Esau remained Jacob’s brother) to the gentile world.70 The Jews who were attracted to him, posits Bornstein, were descendants (either literal or via gilgul) of those who had already defiled themselves with Hellenism a century before. Bornstein assumed, with rabbinic support, that one reason the Second Temple was destroyed was because of the increased Hellenization of Israelite society. This historical observation was accompanied by a mythic frame utilizing a halakhic principle. Intentionally or not, Bornstein mixed up the story of the Greeks’ unsuccessful attempt to destroy Israel in the first century BCE, the context of the Hanukkah story, and the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, soon after the crucifixion of Jesus. When the Edomites (Greeks) came to destroy Israel, they found remnants of themselves in Israel, Hellenistic elements that were embedded in Israel proper. Could this also imply that Esau still had some presence among the Israelites, for example, Deuteronomy 23:8: “You shall not abhor the Edomite, for he is your brother”? Israel eventually persevered in its battle against the Greeks, but we know that very soon after-

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ward, during the reign of Jonathan (and later with his younger brother Simon), Israel reinstituted a covenant with Sparta, formally bringing Hellenism back into Israelite society.71 Bornstein seems to imply here that the Israelite/Greek encounter in the first century BCE set up the rise of Christianity in the first century CE. That is, the Hasmoneans (the Israelite rebels also known as the Maccabees) may have purged the Greek defilement from the Temple, but their infiltration into the Israelite psyche remained. The rise of Christianity (and its popularity among some Israelites and Jews) was for him a kind of necessary evil, a further stage of purification required for Israel’s redemption. Edomites/ Greeks, who descended from Esau, Jacob’s brother, were defeated, but they left parts of themselves, essentially defiled dimensions of Israel, imbedded in the progeny of Jacob. When Jesus came and attracted these defiled remnants, he served to complete in the body of Israel what was begun at Sinai and what the Hasmoneans continued in the Temple. In Bornstein’s reading, Jesus performed the function of purification based on the principle of min be-mino, a halakhic principle that states identical elements do not constitute an interruption (‫)מין במינו אינו חוצץ‬.72 With the support of unnamed kabbalistic sources, Bornstein interpreted this to mean that selfsame elements would always be attracted to one another.73 Impurity is an integral part of the alchemic purification process. According to Jewish sources, to purify precious metal (gold, silver, etc.) of its impure remnants one must add external matter (e.g., copper or sometimes dirt) that will attract and then separate the impure from the pure. “Separation through fire” may be a double entendre, referring both to the process of purifying metal and the burning of the Temple just a few decades after Jesus was crucified and JewishChristian communities began to form. This process of purification was reified in kabbalistic literature to suggest that the demonic played a role in the final eradication of itself largely because the defiled contains elements of purity that need to be released through interaction with the sacred. Only the defiled, via min be-mino, can render the final purification that would otherwise be facilitated by Torah.74 To illustrate this point, Bornstein invoked the rabbinic comment that Jesus, or whomever the rabbis were referring to, was punished by eternal immersion in boiling excrement as a kind of metaphor for his heresy (b.T. Gittin 57a–b). But on this reading it also served as an unintended support of his followers, who identified him as the “suffering servant” based on Deutero-Isaiah 51–53.75

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Jesus (Esau) confronted Israel (Jacob) to complete the separation between them that was left unfinished in the Genesis myth. Jesus purified Israel by cleansing them, as it were, of the remaining poisonous influence and then suffered in eternity in the very poison he extracted from them. For Bornstein this process cannot be complete, however, since redemption has not come. So while Jesus, as a Jewish heretic, gave the world Christianity, which for Bornstein is, among other things, the repository of all the poison that Israel garnered and absorbed from its beginnings (poison that still may contain remnants of holiness), this is only accomplished by Israel encountering one of its own who has gone astray (Esau/Jesus) who can enact the process of min ­be-mino, thereby purifying Israel and preparing her for redemption.76 For this to take place, the kelippot must have jurisdiction to extend outward to encounter the poison embedded in Israel and then absorb it. Here is where Nittel Nacht comes into play. While one would think Torah study produces the holiness necessary for redemption, Bornstein suggests it also plays a negative role in the ultimate purification. Torah, as fire, burns out all the kelippot around it. But the kelippot are actually needed in order to absorb min be-mino, the remaining poison in Israel. By desisting from Torah study on the day of Jesus’s birth, Jews allow the kelippot to extend, encounter Israel, and absorb its poison. Why that day? Here Bornstein seems to undermine the traditional justification for Nittel Nacht, that it prevents Jesus from using the power of Torah for evil ends. For Bornstein, Jews desist from Torah study in order to enable the kelippah to exist and serve the function Jesus served, that is, funnel the poison from Israel and into Jesus. In short, through Jewish negation, by desisting from Torah study, Jews enable the mythic figure of Jesus to continue to do his work.77 Bornstein works with a similar theme but adds a few nuances. The text begins with the talmudic introduction to the story of Hanukkah and then proceeds to expand on it in a direction similar to the previous text. “When the Greeks entered the sanctuary they defiled all the oil in the sanctuary.”78 This all seems to be a hint to souls. In their decree the Greeks first entered the most important place [le-mifsar tehila] and then placed the poison [zuhama] into [all of] Israel. And because they were defiled—that is, they were [like] promiscuous women [peruzot ha-mitrazot] [b.T. Ketubot, 2b–3b] they had the power to enter into the sanctuary and actively defile all the oil and the spirituality in the souls of Israel.

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There is an intentional slippage here between the story of the defilement of the Greeks, the sin of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and the sin of the golden calf at Mount Sinai. This connection is made explicit in another text on the same subject. We read in Shabbat [146a]: “When the serpent came upon Eve he inseminated her with poison.” And even though the serpent was removed, it was necessary to clean out the poison [he placed in Eve]. This poison remained until Israel stood at Mount Sinai. So it is with the Greeks. Their entire project was to place tumah in Israel. Even though the Greeks were killed and retreated and the Greek Empire nullified, their poison [zuhama] still remained [in Israel] and needed a long time to be cleansed from them.79

Beginning with the language of tumah in the talmudic description of the Hanukkah story, in the first text Bornstein reads into their decree that they “placed within them poison,” a clear reference to the talmudic description of the serpent and Eve (b.T. Shabbat 146a, b.T. Yebamot 103b). According to the Babylonian Talmud, when the Israelites stood at Sinai, the poison of the serpent was removed from them, but for all those who did not stand at Sinai (that is, gentiles), the poison remained. All this is made explicit in the second text, which then leads immediately into a discussion of Jesus. The zoharic reading of this talmudic story seems to underlie Bornstein’s reading. The Zohar extends, and in some way subverts, this talmudic reading by suggesting that when the Israelites built the golden calf, the poison returned to them as well. When Israel stood before Mount Sinai, the impurity of the serpent was removed from the people, so that the evil inclination was suppressed among them, and in consequence they were able to attach themselves to the Tree of Life. . . . When they sinned by worshipping the calf, they descended from their high perch and lost their illumination. They were thus deprived of their protection from God and were exposed to the evil serpent as before, and so brought death into the world.80

The Greek defilement of the Temple—or, more precisely in Bornstein’s reading, “the souls of Israel”—is here a reenactment of the serpent’s insemination of Eve that requires an event to expunge the poison that would be equivalent to the Sinai theophany in Exodus 19 that expelled the poison of original sin. The language of “entering the sanctuary” (‫ )להכנס להיכל‬in the talmudic description of the Hanukkah story now takes on a particularly sexual meaning. This is sup-

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ported by his use of the term peruzot ha-mitrazot in Ketubot 3b, a reference to promiscuity and untrustworthiness. The text continues: The poison that entered into Israel [at that time] was like poison in a pot of boiling water. Because of the boiling water, the poison was pushed to the lip of the pot until it was expelled. Because of the heroic actions of the sages of the Mishna [generations later] the Torah was like boiling water, and the poison was expelled from Israel.

Through interpretation of Torah, the rabbinic project (the sages of the Mishna) successfully purges Israel of the poison of the Greeks. According to Bornstein, in Rabbinic Judaism the Torah becomes more than “water” (a common rabbinic reference to Torah); it is also fire (boiling water being the combination of fire and water) expelling Greek influence from the Israelite soul. There is much that can be made of Bornstein’s allusion that Rabbinic Judaism (law) is the antidote to Greek wisdom. The heroic acts of the sages are likened to a Sinai-like event (perhaps a reference to Mishna Avot 1:1) as a solution to the Greek defilement of Israel depicted as a replay of Eve’s sin with the serpent that precipitated the defilement of humankind. This all serves as the context for the introduction of Jesus. And after a few generations [from the episode of the Greeks in the sanctuary] Jesus [oto ha-ish] came from Israel, as is known. Hence the time of his birth was also the time of the demise of the Greeks. [His appearance] was the sign of the completion of the expulsion of the Greek poison from Israel completely.

Jesus becomes the symbol, or perhaps the sign, of the last remnant of Hellenism (Greece and Rome) expelled from Israel, the final portion of tumah that was ejected by the boiling water (Torah) of the rabbinic project. The fact that historically Jesus fought against the powers of Rome for the sake of Israel is irrelevant to Bornstein because for him the fusion of Edom and Jesus is an undeniable reality only slightly blurred by historical details. But for Bornstein Jesus is more than a sign of rabbinic victory of Hellenistic infiltration that began a century and a half earlier. He serves a positive function as well. Borstein illustrates Jesus’s crucial function in the redemptive process in this way: The custom to desist from Torah study [on Christmas Eve] hints at the cessation of Jesus’s attachment to Israel by the means of Torah. We know that he was a student of Yehoshua ben Perahya, and by this means he was completely expelled

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from the community of Israel. One can now explain what is written [b.T. Gittin 57b] that he was punished with boiling excrement. Human excrement has the foulest odor [of all excrement] as we read in Hazal [b.T. Sukkah 42b] on the verse, “As wisdom grows, pain grows” [Eccles. 1:18]. Jesus was from the extraneous matter [or excrement] of the Greeks who were philosophers who utilized reason [wisdom], which gave them an advantage of all the other kingdoms. They were also more physical [homerim] [than others] and the extraneous matter that was left from their poison was like the matter excreted from a human who is a carrier of knowledge, which has the foulest odor. Hence, he was punished according to his essence, that is, in the foulest smelling human excrement. Nevertheless, this is also for the good in that it will find its own kind [min be-mino]. In time all extraneous matter will find the boiling excrement [which is Jesus’s essence]. And the existing good within it, the remnant of the seed of Israel, will be fixed.81

Bornstein holds here that the Greeks represent the most physical and most rational of human societies. In light of such corporeality, coupled with the talmudic comment about human feces (b.T. Sukkah 42b), he suggests that the feces of the Greeks and their progeny are the foulest smelling. Jesus is severed from any remnant of his Jewishness and embodies all that Hellenistic society offers. Yet Jesus, standing in for Christianity, serves a crucial function. Once again, deploying min be-mino, Bornstein argues that Jesus becomes the magnet for all defilement, suggesting that all remaining remnants of tumah will be finally drawn out of Israel and injected into Jesus/Christianity through the excrement of Jesus’s punishment. Jesus comes into the world precisely when the rabbis of the Mishna (his rabbinic history may be a bit inaccurate) succeed. But they do not succeed fully. Jesus is expelled from the boiling pot to complete what the rabbis began so precisely through his embodiment of tumah. Not unlike Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection (denunciation or the notion of being cast off), the rabbis want to excise the unholy from their midst but cannot do so fully because the unholy is part of themselves.82 What is fascinating about Bronstein’s Jesus is that he functions like an inverted messiah. The messianic figure as depicted in kabbalistic tradition is one who ushers in the final redemption by uplifting the remaining holy sparks from the kelippah. Here Bornstein suggests that Jesus does the opposite: he draws to himself the remaining unholy remnants out of the holiness of Israel (min be-mino), thus purifying Israel in preparation for redemption or, perhaps, in

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preparation for the Jewish messiah to do the rest. Without Jesus, who is both Jewish and wholly defiled, a gilgul of Esau, there is no way to expunge the defiled elements in Israel fully from the Hellenistic influence. Through heroic acts the rabbis do most of the work but, not being min be-mino with tumah, something invariably remains. Thus without Jesus as the inverted Messiah, there can be no Jewish redemption, and maybe no Jewish messiah, because there can be no purification. The Jewish messiah can liberate the remaining sparks of holiness from the kelippah but he cannot extract the unholy elements from Israel. The final text from Shem me-Shmuel I will examine does not refer to Jesus but rather to Esau as oto ha-ish. This label derives from Genesis Rabba 65:5, where Esau is juxtaposed with Joseph, with the latter functioning as true mirror of Esau. “Says R. Pinhas from R. Shmuel bar Nahman, It is a tradition [mesora] that Esau will only fall at the hands of the descendants of Rachel, as it is written, ‘Hear then the plan which the Lord has devised against Edom, and what He has proposed against the inhabitants of Teman: Surely the young shepherds shall drag him away’ (Jer. 49:20). ‘The young shepherds’—these are the young among the tribes [i.e., Joseph].”83 Behold, the House of Jacob is fire (and the House of Joseph flame) (Ob. 1:18). As it is written, “The light of Israel will be fire” (Isa. 10:17). The sanctity and light in Israel is like the fire that burns all extraneous forces that come into its midst. . . . [But] this will not be sufficient to nullify the power of Esau. In the future Esau will be in command . . . because his evil is so concealed that even an angel cannot recognize it. His great ability to conceal this evil comes from the lofty souls within him. Just as those lofty souls are deep [penimim], he uses that deep [power] to conceal himself.

Esau should be here with all the associations explained above, including the Lurianic identification of Esau and Jesus. Some midrashic variants include oto ha-ish as a reference to Esau and some do not (the text Bornstein reads does use the term oto ha-ish). Bornstein’s assertion that Jacob cannot nullify Esau on his own is easily extrapolated from the biblical narrative itself (Gen. 33). Yet without this nullification (and here Christendom can easily be inserted into Esau/Edom) the Jewish covenant remains unfulfilled. But the House of Joseph is a flame that extends a great distance, it has the ability to draw itself to the borders of the demonic side [sitra ahra] and to lift the lofty souls by means of extending holiness [kedusha] to the borders of the unholy [hizonim]. . . . This is what it means that Joseph, as the mirror of the oto ha-ish

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[Esau] could accomplish what the holy fire of Jacob could not. Since [Jacob’s] fire could not extend very far it was like a fire that only reached the borders of kedusha but could not penetrate into the realm of the unholy [hizonim]. Therefore, without Joseph there would be no way to succeed against Esau, who contained within him some very lofty souls.84

Bornstein goes on to say that Jacob does utilize some of Joseph’s power to ­diminish Esau’s dominance but can only do so to equalize him. And [Esau said]: “Let us start out on our journey and I will proceed at your pace” [Gen. 33:15]. That is, he [Esau] becomes equal to Jacob. In the future, however, we read [continuing the previous verse from Ob. 1:18] “And no survivor shall be left in the House of Esau.” There is a way to explain this verse that it means that all of the lofty souls and shards of kedusha will be taken from Esau, as we read, “there is no survivor [‫ ]שריד‬except Torah sages [‫ ]חכמים תלמיד‬as it is written, “Anyone who invokes the Lord will be among the survivors [‫”]ובשרידים‬ [Joel 3:5] [b.T. Sanhedrin 92b].85

Joseph, of course, represents the quintessential zaddik in Hasidism and here is depicted as the one who can finally empty Esau / Edom / Christianity of those lofty souls (“survivors”) who remained there, not by destroying Esau (here he offers a more muted reading of Ob. 1:18) but by engaging him and drawing out what was left behind. This is because Joseph could extend his influence (or “flame”) not only to the very borders of the holy but beyond, into the realm of the unholy and, min be-mino, draw the lofty souls to himself. Joseph in this text does exactly what Jesus does in the previous texts, although Jesus draws out the unholy from the holy and Joseph does the opposite. Joseph and Esau/ Jesus are viewed here as mirror images; each is required to complete the task of the other. There is no redemption without the zaddik (Joseph). And there is no redemption without Jesus. Without Jesus Israel is not pure; without the zaddik Israel is not complete.

IV On one level there is little in common between Buber’s “Baal Shem Tov” Jesus and Bornstein’s “defiled” Jesus. Buber wanted us to re-envision Jesus as the initiator of a series of wise men who fought against the inclination to gnosticize religious myths and create intermediaries between the human and the divine. These spiritual figures were the bulwarks against religion for the sake

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of authentic meeting. Utilizing the historical Jesus school Buber gave us a Jesus whose humanness was his greatest asset. For Buber, Jesus’s fight was against the corruption of the true biblical religion. Throughout history, he argued, individuals arose to wage similar battles, oftentimes embodying part, but not all, of the message initiated by Jesus. Sabbatai Zevi and Spinoza were two such figures for Buber. The Baal Shem Tov was another, and Buber may have viewed himself as yet another. These figures were necessary to deflect the human inclination toward gnosticization. Without them the direct meeting between the human and divine in this world, in the every day, coined by Buber as “I and Thou,” would be forever lost. Bornstein’s Jesus is a reified demonic force. He is the embodiment of defilement, a reverse image of the holy. He is Esau, Edom, and Christendom. He is the enemy of the Jews. Yet Bornstein stresses that, as a gilgul of Esau, Jesus is still the brother of Jacob. Even as Jesus was defiled he was, for Bornstein, a Jew throughout. He embodied the dark side of the Israelite nation. He was Israel’s internal enemy. Playing the role of the repository of defilement, Jesus played a crucial function for Bornstein in the redemptive process. In exile, Israel still carried the poison placed in it by Hellenistic civilization, even the poison that remained from Eve’s sexual encounter with the serpent. Rabbinic Judaism arose to correct that blemish through the study of Torah, and it largely succeeded. But not fully; it could not completely cleanse Israel of this blemish because it has no access to the blemish. It can, and does, according to Bornstein, separate the holy sparks embedded in the kelippah but it cannot separate the unholy from the holy. To accomplish this we need one who is unholy yet retains a connection to the holy. In other words, the Jewish redemption needs Jesus. This unorthodox rendering of Jesus and the Jews is illustrated in Bornstein’s reading of Obadiah 1:18, “And no survivor shall be left in the House of Esau.” It does not mean that Esau/Edom will be destroyed. It means that all the shards of holiness in Esau will be liberated. For Bornstein, this process also requires the inverse; all unholiness must be liberated from the holy. It is Jesus, the inverted Jewish messiah who absorbs the unholy min be-mino and, as a result, suffers eternally in the human excrement of Israel’s unholiness, indeed a gruesome rendering of Deutero-Isaiah’s suffering servant. What Buber and Bornstein share is the idea that Jesus is a necessary part of the spiritual and historical development of the Jews. For Buber, Jews forever need new Jesus figures who can bring redemption by deflecting attempts to exile them from God through gnostic mediation. For Bornstein, tied to the his-

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torical notion of redemption as a future event, the Jews need Jesus to complete what Sinai began, what the Hasmoneans and the rabbis continued—purging the unholiness from the body of the holy. Bornstein likens Jesus, by implication, to a mutated form of the biblical Joseph, the only son of Jacob who could extend his sacred lineage beyond the barrier of tumah to its very bowels and draw out min be-mino the poison that remained. We should note (even as Bornstein does not) the similarities between Joseph and Jesus, especially regarding their having overcome the temptation of sexual seduction, drawing us back to the serpent and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which Bornstein explicitly connects to the success of Hellenism to defile the Jews in the first century BCE. Jews have grappled with Jesus from the moment Christianity began to threaten the cohesiveness of the Jews. Much has been written and much more has been said about the role of Jesus in the Jewish imagination. Buber was often chastised for his tolerance, even celebration, of Jesus the Jew. But this may have been because Buber was the most explicit in his declaration “Jesus is my brother.” In Bornstein there is none of that. Yet we do see something quite subtle, even striking, in his assessment of the defiled Jesus. For Bornstein, Jesus the Jew (as Esau the wayward brother of Jacob) had the power to achieve what no Jew could: he had the power to absorb evil min be-mino and suffer eternally for his actions. His stance on Jesus the Jew is nothing positive in any conversional sense. But it is a necessary Jesus nonetheless.

6

LIBERAL JUDAISM, C H R I S T I A N I T Y, A N D T H E SPECTER OF HASIDISM In everything that guides our life and determines our view thereof, we have become Christianized, for we have somehow accepted Christ if not in the theological sense of a savior at least in the historical sense of a civilizer. We have fallen in with the prevalent view that Christianity is essential to the progress of human civilization, which is, after all, another version of the Christian belief that Christ is necessary for the salvation of one’s soul. . . . We proceed on the assumption that modern civilization is the fulfillment of the promises of Christ. Harry Austryn Wolfson, “How the Jews Will Reclaim Jesus” The incarnational direction of my thinking became possible for me only after I succeeded in freeing myself from the need to be as different from Christianity as possible. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith

I As mentioned in the Introduction, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in antiquity or, in what interests me here, the affinities between Judaism and Christianity, has long been a topic of scholarly debate. This topic is experiencing a revival among contemporary students of ancient Judaism. Scholars such as Daniel Boyarin, Peter Schäfer, Seth Schwartz, and Shaye C ­ ohen, among others, have reexamined scholarly opinion and offered bold new ideas about the vexed nature of this relationship in late antiquity. Examples of this new reflection can be found in two recent books, B ­ oyarin’s The Jewish Gospels (2012) and Schäfer’s The Jewish Jesus (2012). Both authors agree that it was not only Christians drawing on the Judaism of its time but, according to Schäfer, “in certain cases the rabbis appropriated Christian ideas that the Christians had inherited from the Jews, hence that rabbinic Judaism reappropriated originally Jewish ideas that were usurped by Christianity.”1 While this finding is not new, Schäfer offers novel readings of the way the Bavli

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(Babylonian Talmud) continued to appropriate, even as it rejected, themes already common in Christianity. Boyarin makes a stronger, somewhat different claim that “Christology, or the ideas about Christ, is also a Jewish discourse and not—until much later—an anti-Jewish discourse. . . . Jesus and Christ were one from the very beginning of the Jesus movement.”2 For Boyarin, “the theological controversy that we think exists between Jews and Christians was already an intra-Jewish controversy long before Jesus.”3 How is Boyarin and Schäfer’s work on Judaism and Christianity relevant to this book on the question of Hasidism and its iteration of certain Christian tropes in modernity? What contemporary scholars such as Boyarin and Schäfer have done is provide an important Judaic component to a new way of looking at the emergence or perhaps pre-history of Christology that was forged by Christian scholars Larry Hurtado, Richard Baukham, and John and Adela Collins (among others) and its relationship to Judaism.4 Boyarin views Christology as an integral part of pre-doctrinal Judaism, the remnants of which can be seen in inter-testamental literature written by Jews (1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, Song of Solomon, Dead Sea Scrolls material, etc.); in pre-Christian Jewish interpretations of Daniel 7, Psalms 2, 110, and so on; in various rabbinic teachings; and in the use of cosmic motifs such Metatron or the cosmic Adam.5 Schäfer views the same material as a later reaction and resistance to Christianity by Babylonian sages. While not denying the pre-Christian existence of Christological themes, Schäfer argues that Rabbinic Judaism is best viewed in a reactive rather than descriptive or adaptive mode. He subtitled his book “How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other,” but according to Schäfer the two religions were not necessarily as indistinguishable as Boyarin claims. Jews who were engaged in the construction of Judaism after emancipation, and especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were very invested in the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity. While medieval polemical literature was primarily founded on defending Judaism against Christianity, in part by arguing for the irrationality of Christian doctrine, the modern Jewish engagement with Christianity was more nuanced. On the one hand, enlightened Jews wanted to illustrate the affinities between Judaism and modernity (which was, in essence, a form of Protestantism). On the other hand, because modern Judaism indeed resembled certain elements of Christianity in its adaptation of modernity, Jewish thinkers were adamant about distinguishing Judaism from Christianity. Sometimes, for example in thinkers as disparate as Abraham Geiger and Hermann Cohen, it was to argue

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that Judaism and not Christianity was the true “rational” or “ethical” religion. Other times it was simply to draw categorical distinctions between the two religions. In some sense—and here I generalize for heuristic purposes—modern Judaism, especially from the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century, was often defined against Christianity. Boyarin opens The Jewish Gospels with the following: If there is one thing that Christians know about their religion, it is that it is not Judaism. If there is one thing that Jews know about their religion, it is that it is not Christianity. If there is one thing that both groups know about the double not, it is that Christians believe in the Trinity and incarnation of Christ (the Greek word for Messiah) and that Jews don’t.6

Setting aside theological considerations informing these categorical distinctions, the social context for this veritable obsession with difference is understandable. Jewish conversion to Christianity was common at that time, and this required Jewish intellectuals to distinguish their religion from Christianity in part as a way to deter potential conversion (that is, if Judaism is not categorically different from Christianity, why not convert?).7 A good example of this, though one that functions on a sophisticated philosophical/theological level, can be found in the 1916 correspondence between Franz Rosenzweig and his Christian cousin Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy gathered by the latter in a book titled Judaism Despite Christianity.8 What we call an “obsession with difference” arguably continues in many Jewish intellectual circles today though the social reality that may have generated or at least contributed to such an approach no longer exists (Jews are not converting to Christianity today in any significant numbers).9 On a popular level it is common today to hear things like “we Jews don’t believe in incarnation,” or “Jews never believed in a resurrected messiah.” Boyarin and Schäfer’s work challenges such platitudes in ways that should be of interest not only to scholars but also to contemporary Jews and Christians who want to maintain allegiance to their respective traditions while also seeking to cultivate areas of mutuality. Coexistence between Jews and Christians need not only be a product of pluralism (“respecting our differences”) but also a recognition of the more complex ways Judaism and Christianity are intertwined even as they manifest in very different ways. While this is often done in more general ways, Boyarin, Schäfer, and others offer complicated avenues of mutuality from a viewpoint of a time (late antiquity) when borders and lines were indeed blurred and consistently redrawn.

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II Although Hasidism began in the late eighteenth century around the time of ­Moses Mendelssohn, when architects of Jewish modernity such as Leopold Zunz and Solomon Maimon were working hard to reconstruct the Jewish tradition though historical and philological analysis, it is rarely included in studies or courses on modern Jewish thought.10 At best, students are exposed to Hasidic thought through the works of Martin Buber or Abraham Joshua Heschel, both of whom used Hasidic spirituality to cultivate their own modern Jewish theological views.11 While scholars such as Buber and Heschel introduced Hasidism to a new generation of readers in postwar America, they were products of prewar Europe, where accentuating differences between Judaism and Christianity was still common. Buber’s Two Types of Faith succeeded in bridging the theological gap in important ways. Both Christianity and Judaism presented Hasidism as an under-examined form of “authentic” Jewish spirituality in modernity, but neither focused on the elements of Hasidism that resonate with Christianity.12 In order to place the current study among contemporary thinking about Judaism and Christianity that does not both begin and end with identifying the differences between the two, we continue here by discussing the work of two scholars from the early twentieth century and two contemporary t­ hinkers. The prewar authors wrote when Jewish apologetic thought was in full sway. The two contemporary specialists undermine these apologetics and show the extent to which the differences between Judaism and Christianity are not as clear as previously thought.13 Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909–1980) and Leo Baeck (1873–1956) are examples of how liberal Judaism responded to its closeness to Christianity by creating theological distance and categorical difference.14 Both Schoeps and Baeck wrote extensively about Judaism and Christianity, each forging his theological position through an exhaustive analysis of both religions. Each focused on the differences between the two religions and argued that true dialogue could only come about when both were viewed as categorically different yet not necessarily incompatible. Michael Wyschogrod (b. 1928) and Elliot Wolfson (b. 1956) draw from the wide scope of the Jewish philosophical tradition and, in Wolfson’s case, from the Kabbalah. Wyschogrod is more an Orthodox Jewish theologian than a scholar of Judaism, and his activities extend to ecumenical and activist work. Wolfson’s writing is scholarly in nature; he examines the complexities of the philosophical traditions to see how Christian ideas such as incarnation find

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expression, often in veiled forms, in Jewish esoteric literature. While hewing closely to the texts and drawing out threads of their interpretive genius, Wolfson’s scholarship contains the seeds of constructive theology. His contribution is to show how the esoteric tradition trafficked in categorical distinctions between Jews and Christians in ways that are problematic, at least in a doctrinal sense.15 Using the Jewish-Christian distinction in modern Jewish thought as a cornerstone, both Wyschogrod and Wolfson encourage a reassessment of the fabric of modern Judaism. They constitute another part of the larger project that includes Boyarin and Schäfer. My purpose in plotting a trajectory in twentieth-century Jewish thinking that moves from apologetics to self-scrutiny is to contextualize Hasidism as part of modern Jewish inquiry into the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. My understanding of Hasidism is very much an extension of the salient discussions exemplified here by Wyschogrod and Wolfson, that is, to reassess the affinities between Judaism and Christianity on theological and hermeneutical grounds.

III Hans-Joachim Schoeps was a scholar of religious history and early Christianity. Although he wrote extensively on Judaism and Christianity and played an important role in the development of Jewish-Christian dialogue in Europe after World War II, he remains one of the lesser-known German Jewish intellectuals.16 He was born in Berlin and immigrated to Sweden in 1938, believing until quite late that Jews could survive under the Nazi regime. His parents perished in the concentration camps. Schoeps returned to Germany after the war and taught at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen from 1950 until his death. His work was overshadowed by that of more prominent figures such as Buber, Rosenzweig, Heschel, Baeck, and Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, yet Schoeps articulated a theory of Jewish and Christian mutuality and difference that in many ways mirrors what we see in the Rosenstock-Huessy correspondence and later in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption.17 My focus here is Schoeps’s The Jewish-Christian Argument: A History of Theologies in Conflict, written in the mid-1930s, published in German as Israel und Christenheit in 1961, and translated into English in 1963.18 This volume offers a synoptic sweep of Jewish attitudes toward Christianity from late antiquity to the twentieth century. The historical framework is less a study of history than a way for Schoeps to trace the development of these beliefs across ideological

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borders. The study went as far as the Enlightenment and its aftermath, where Schoeps believed true Jewish-Christian dialogue could occur. As he wrote, it is only in the context of the “new religion,” the religion of the Enlightenment, that Jews and Christians can truly engage on productive dialogue.19 Schoeps was fully devoted to the proliferation of Jewish-Christian dialogue, but only if founded on the categorical difference between both religions.20 He differed from like-minded Jewish thinkers of the period, even Rosenzweig, in that he was sympathetic to Christianity, yet he remained committed to the absolute truth of Sinai as the center of Jewish consciousness. According to Schoeps, both Jews and Christians must profess their allegiance to the “absolute truth” of their respective revelations. Quite evident is his allegiance to Karl Barth, who plays a central role in Schoeps’s anti-philosophical, or perhaps anti-liberal, thinking.21 For the Jew, “God’s word is heard solely and exclusively through the Tanakh, the revelation of God needs no supplement, increase, or fulfillment,” and for the Christian the belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth “has the same absolute status which the covenant of Sinai has for Israel.”22 He argued that only fidelity to the absoluteness of “revelation” and not history creates the conditions for mutuality founded on difference. “Christian and Jews, each faithful to his own belief and his own way of life, bear common witness together before the world that they possess tidings from the divine realm; they go through history as corporeal evidence of the truth of God.”23 As tolerant of this assessment of Christianity may seem, Schoeps’s approach was far from nonjudgmental, and he often trafficked in arguments common among Jewish apologists of his period. At the same time, Schoeps was roundly criticized by Jewish scholars such as Alexander Altmann and Gershom Scholem for being too sympathetic to Christianity and antagonistic toward the notion of tradition as a central vehicle of revelation.24 Without making the more brazen claim that Judaism is superior to Christianity on Christianity’s own terms because only Judaism is “non-dogmatic” and “ethical” in its core (this is reflected in Hermann Cohen and Leo Baeck), Schoeps gestures to the Greek and pagan origins of Christology while distancing ancient Judaism from those influences. “It was Paul who for the first time, reflecting on the messianic figure (of Jesus), made out of a title of dignity an ontological affirmation and raised it to a mythical level of thought. . . . The myth clearly represented here . . . points to pagan spheres, more specifically to the religious syncretism of Asia Minor.”25 The claim that Jesus’s “divinity” is simply “an impossibility for Judaism,” and that Paul’s view of the law is “quite as un-Jewish as any doctrine of original sin, which denied

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the freedom of God’s creation,” all fits nicely into the hierarchical nature of early twentieth-century Jewish polemics against Christianity set in the context of dialogue.26 Yet in his book on Paul, Schoeps argues that Paul’s critique of the law was something “intrinsic to Judaism.”27 Schoeps had a particular kind of approach that, unlike Baeck, was so steeped in Protestant thought that even his critique of Christianity was made ambivalent through his critique of normative Judaism. Claims of the foreignness of these ideas to ancient Judaism cannot easily bear the historical or theological weight of scholarship not derived from an apologetic appraisal of Judaism. But one cannot blame Schoeps for his station in history. He seemed to argue, although never explicitly, that everything that was in accord with Jewish covenantal doctrine in Christianity was “Jewish” and everything outside that, mostly what originated in Paul, was Hellenistic.28 He did this even as he acknowledged Paul’s critique of the law as intrinsic to Judaism. He argued that various problematic edicts of the rabbinic sages were promulgated to contest the un-Jewish components of Christianity and should not necessarily be taken as a true expression of their beliefs, or at least the rabbis should be understood as acting in a reactive mode. Of course Schoeps failed to recognize, perhaps because he simply could not accept his own contextual reasons that, as Schäfer and Boyarin have shown, these very problematic notions exist within the rabbinic tradition itself.29 That very admission would undermine the foundation of his theory of dialogue, one based on the assumption of categorical difference. “Here we shall once more discuss the essential difference systematically. As long as it is not fully understood, all dialogue between the two groups takes place in a vacuum” [italics added].30 What is so fascinating about Schoeps is who he chose to exemplify his theory. One chapter focuses on Hizzuk Emunah by the Karaite Isaac Troki (1533–1594). Schoeps used Hizzuk Emunah as the great exemplar of medieval polemics in part because it is “calm and reasonable in comparison with other works of the genre.”31 Troki’s refutation of Christians was founded primarily on his critique of the biblical exegesis upon which they made their doctrinal claims. Schoeps could have easily chosen more “rabbinic” polemicists, from Moses Nahmanides to Hasdai Crescas to Joseph Albo. Instead he selected a Karaite to represent the best that Judaism had to offer in this period. The prominence awarded Troki in The Jewish-Christian Argument was not an isolated oddity. Schoeps’s choice to focus on the converso Isaac Orobio de Castro (1617–1687) in his discussion of the transition to the Enlightenment makes one wonder what Schoeps was trying to convey.32 One could think of

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many prominent rabbis who could have occupied the early modernity slot, most obviously Menashe ben Israel. Orobio was a prolific author but likely did not know Hebrew (neither did Schoeps), so his access to Jewish sources was severely limited. In short, Orobio was hardly representative of the classical tradition. It seems Schoeps was intent on selecting polemicists who affirmed the categorical distinction between Judaism and Christianity without undermining the viability of Christian claims—that is, individuals who, like Schoeps, worked on the margins of Judaism. Thus it makes sense to have selected Troki, whose focus was on scriptural exegesis and was not a frontal attack on the rationality of Christian doctrine. On Orobio, Schoeps wrote, “The essence of his apologetic and polemic statements resides—it seems to me—in the fact that he saw one thing clearly and spoke it plainly; even though Jews and Christians have the same concepts and terms, such as revelation, redemption, Messiah, restoration, and so on, for the most part they use these with different content, because the postulates of the Jewish faith differ from those of Christianity.”33 The thread from Troki to Orobio to modernity is characterized by differences, rather than being a zero-sum game as with the more traditional polemicists who argue that Christianity is false on Christian as well Jewish terms. Moreover, it seems Schoeps intentionally chose representatives on the margins of, or even outside, rabbinic tradition. This is apparent in his appraisal of Paul’s critique of the law, which Schoeps believed should be a continuing presence in contemporary Judaism. He wrote, “Only modern Judaism can appreciate once again, like Christianity, Paul’s concern and the tension which he felt between the works of the law and faith, and it can appreciate it all the more because it maintains a tension and refuses with Paul to dissolve the tension prematurely in the elimination of one of its poles.”34 Following Karl Barth, for Schoeps tradition does not mediate revelation; this is where he thinks classical Judaism in is error. He argued that Jews must return to “an unmediated hearing of the Word of God” through Scripture.35 Schoeps turned to Moses Mendelssohn and focused primarily on that philosopher’s attempt to view Judaism in universal terms expressed in particularistic language (Torah as “legislation”). He quoted Mendelssohn: “Since the creator intended all men for eternal bliss, an exclusive religion cannot be a true one. I venture to state this as a criterion for truth in religious matters. No revelation purporting to be alone capable of saving man can be the true revelation, for it does not harmonize with the purposes of the all-merciful creator.”36 Yet Schoeps was not at all taken by this fundament of Jewish liberalism. In fact,

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his work involved rectifying the blurred boundaries that liberalism suggests, believing in the absolute nature of the revelation one represents. In Barthian fashion he claimed that while the Enlightenment set the conditions for true Jewish-Christian dialogue, the liberalism that came out of it undermined the ability to hear the Word of God.37 He claimed that Mendelssohn missed the core claim of the Jewish covenant, that the Living God “acted in the history of this nation; who above all, revealed not only laws but also doctrines of creation ex nihilo.”38 Schoeps noted that even Mendelssohn “strove to remunerate irrationality or preterrationality of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity, original sin, the incarnation, redemption through Christ, the resurrection, the ascensions, and so forth.”39 In other words, for liberalism to function as a template for true dialogue it must affirm the categorical difference between Judaism and Christianity, and this difference is created via claims of “irrationality” of the very doctrines that constituted Christianity. This is done without any self-­reflection as to the problematic nature of “irrationalities” in Judaism, something Scholem brought to the fore around this time (mid-century) and scholars such as Wolfson, Yehuda Liebes, and Moshe Idel developed further later on. For Schoeps the most important Jewish thinker on these questions in the nineteenth century was Salomon Ludwig Steinheim (1789–1866). Steinheim’s four-volume Revelation According to the Doctrine of the Synagogue (1835–1865) is partially translated in Joshua Q. Haberman’s Philosopher of Revelation: The Life and Thought of Ludwig Steinheim.40 Steinheim’s basic argument was that revelation stood as the epicenter of both Judaism and Christianity and the latter diluted revelation with its syncretistic adaptation of paganism, the foundation of Christian dogma. Both Judaism and Christianity, however, distorted revelation through philosophy, in particular the Hegelian and late neo-­Kantian notion of the true religion as the expression of the Idea (Hegel’s philosophy as the overcoming of religion or the neo-Kantian moral philosophy as the fulfillment of true religion). For Steinheim, “the nature and Shiboleth of a divine revelation is that it does not agree with our religious consciousness, but instead it contains teachings and commandments which are foreign to, and at times even contradict that consciousness.”41 What mattered most for Schoeps was that Steinheim (who also apparently did not know Hebrew) believed that both Judaism and Christianity are rooted in one theological truth and that liberal Judaism had to return to a commitment to the miraculous nature of revelation and abandon Mendelssohn’s notion of Judaism as a “rational” or “natural” religion.”42 Only then did Judaism have the potential to “draw

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the ‘religion of Christ’ to the realm of the Jewish faith.”43 Here Schoeps used Steinheim to deepen his Barthian position and his strong affinity for Martin Luther (an interesting contrast to Baeck, for whom Luther was the very source of the liberal Protestant problem).44 Schoeps did not want to create any discernible symmetry between Judaism and Christianity. “Thus the witness of one faith stands opposed to that of the other.”45 Rather, he wanted to concretize the categorical differences between them such that neither had an exclusive claim. This difference—what Rosenzweig calls the difference between Moriah and Golgotha—is insurmountable. Yet for Schoeps it is precisely the insurmountability that is the foundation of true dialogue. In order to maintain the difference, Schoeps cannot accept the Jewish roots of Christology, either historically or theologically. To do so would be to undermine Judaism. This he thinks liberalism threatens to do precisely because the liberalism of Adolf Harnack (Christian theologian and author of the controversial anti-Jewish work What Is Christianity? in 1901) and others was founded on the denigration of Judaism as a lived religion.46 Even those more sympathetic to Jewish emancipation could not quite distance themselves from the anti-Jewish bias.47 In such an environment, to accept the Jewish origins of high Christology would give too much credibility to the claim that it is Judaism, and not Christianity, that is guilty of doctrinal distortion. Put otherwise, for Judaism to survive the liberal Christian critique in the early twentieth century it arguably had to be anti-Christological. Schoeps wrote, “God’s love for man resides precisely in the fact that it does not become flesh, but remains God; that, as Lord over heaven and earth, he does not die on the cross as a forsaken man.”48 This should be juxtaposed with what he wrote about Jesus: “blessed miracles have occurred outside Israel and . . . Jesus Christ was one of those miracles.”49 Schoeps, like Rosenzweig, acknowledges that Christianity contains truth and that Christology can be true for Christians, but he argues that it is not only unnecessary but also untrue for Jews. In sum, Schoeps provides a good example of the way Jewish responses to Christology are generated by the liberal attacks on Judaism at a time when it was impossible to acknowledge any Jewish origins of Christianity’s central doctrines. There is a tacit gesture here to what amounts to a theological component in the history of religions school, which claims that the origins of Christianity—that is, the synoptics without Paul—exhibit a non-Christological Christianity. I think this would be acceptable to Schoeps.50 Christology can only come from the outside (paganism through Paul) lest it undermine the “essential dif-

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ference” that is the foundation of this period of Jewish theology. Schoeps did not dwell on the argument of “essences” that Harnack initiated in his What Is Christianity? and Hermann Cohen and Baeck explore in greater detail. But “­essence” does seem to play a role in Schoeps’s apologia.51 One cannot begin to understand Baeck’s oeuvre without his assessment of Christianity, nor grasp his work on Christianity without understanding liberal Judaism’s complex relationship with liberal Protestantism in Germany in the first part of the twentieth century.52 The proximity between the liberal articulations of these two religions pushed thinkers on both sides to draw hard distinctions between themselves. Further, one could argue that liberal Jewish theology in early twentieth-century Germany was founded on sharp distinctions between Judaism and Christianity that were initiated in part by Harnack’s attack on Judaism in his What Is Christianity? 53 Given Baeck’s sharp critique of Harnack, Baeck’s biographer Albert Friedlander wrote, “Paradoxically as it sounds, Baeck loves Christianity. The figure of Jesus is prominent in Baeck’s writings. With the possible exception of C. G. Montefiore, there are few Jewish scholars who have read and reread the Gospels with such warmth. . . . Christianity is still seen within the Jewish framework the child is not denied. And Judaism responds to what it sees of itself within Christianity.”54 While this may be a bit overstated, Baeck did exhibit warmth for his subject, although that would be primarily Christianity in an unadulterated (Jewish) form, perhaps something that existed largely in Baeck’s imagination. He was, alternatively, quite critical of the Christianity that he labeled “romantic religion,” a Christianity that had lost its rootedness in Judaism. Here one wonders how different this assessment was from that of Harnack and his colleagues, who painted unadulterated Judaism—that is, Mosaism—before it degenerated at the hands of the rabbinic sages. In both cases the opposing religion was accepted as long as it reflected the religion one advocated for. Baeck is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his two major books in translation, The Essence of Judaism (1905) and This People Israel (1955–1957). The 1905 edition of The Essence of Judaism underwent significant revisions in a second edition in 1922.55 The 1948 English version was translated from the 1922 expanded German edition. The book’s focus is the use of “essence” to counter Harnack’s attack on Judaism in his What Is Christianity? During and after the war, Baeck significantly altered his approach, abandoning “essence” as a model to depict Judaism, and moved to the notion of “­existence.” This culminated in his mature, less polemical This People Israel, first published

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as Dieses Volk Israel in two volumes and appearing in English in 1965. Part of this work was written in 1942 during Baeck’s internment in the Terezin concentration camp. As was common at the time, Baeck chose Paul as his main target. In his essay “The Faith of Paul,” published in 1952, Baeck sustained the attack on Paul he had begun in 1938 in “Romantic Religion.” “The Faith of Paul” also returned to the thesis in his essay “The Son of Man” that Christianity, either through ­Alexandrian Jewish (Hellenistic) influence or the merging of normalized Gnostic ideas, had completely undermined the Jewish notion of the Son of Man (first articulated in Daniel 7) by merging the divine-like creature and the preexistent messiah.56 “The ideal Israel or, in Daniel’s language, the sar, the archon, the aeon of Israel has become the messiah, and the messiah, the ideal Israel. . . . The ‘son of man’ thus turned from an image into a firm concept and became an essential part of the dogma. The Hellenization of our world was accomplished.”57 In his “Son of Man” essay Baeck mentioned Paul infrequently and preferred to place the blame on Alexandrian Judaism for bringing in pagan and Gnostic influence that was then adopted by Jewish-Christians. Baeck acknowledged that Christianity was the result of an internal struggle, not only in the body of Israel but also in the mind of Paul. This inner turmoil Baeck dubbed the struggle between mystery and commandment. As a liberal student of modern historicism, he did not accept the notion of a purified tradition in Judaism nor the idea that Paul was unique in Jewish circles, although he did claim that Paul took things too far and thus severed his Christology from anything Jewish. He also claimed that normative Judaism, as opposed to Christianity, kept its focus on the tension between mystery and commandment, maintaining the former’s service to the latter and not the other way around. He averred, for example, that “what is peculiar to Judaism is that these two experiences [mystery and commandment] have here become one, and are experienced as one, in a perfect unity.” 58 This oversimplification, probably employed for polemical purposes, may be a response to a much more complicated, even anarchic, view of Judaism advanced by Scholem around the same time. For Baeck, once mystery is allowed to dominate, as he claims it does in Paul and even more strongly in Luther, the tension is lost, and what results is “Romantic Religion.”59 Paul’s beginnings were “within the Jewish compass. . . . But from the same Hellenistic thought, although from a different level, other images and other voices would come to Paul . . . Paul was carried away by them far outside Jewish boundaries.”60 Elsewhere he wrote,

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“The boundary of Judaism was crossed only by Paul at the point where mystery wanted to prevail without commandment, and faith without the law.”61 For Baeck, Christianity after Paul becomes the amalgam of paganism and ­Judaism. “Judaism and paganism were now reconciled, brought together in romanticism, in the world of mystery, of myth, and of sacrament.” Elsewhere in the same essay he writes, “Gnosticism is Christianity without Judaism and, in that sense, pure Christianity. Whenever Christianity wanted to become pure in this way, it became Gnostic.”62 All this cannot really bear the weight of more careful historical and literary analysis of both Paul and normative Judaism that takes place in the contemporary reassessment of Judaism and Christianity. Baeck’s vast knowledge of classical Judaism and Christianity only reinforces the notion that in these essays, built on problematic binaries, he had a clear ulterior motive and these pieces are to be read within their cultural and historical context. In fact Baeck himself abandoned the focus on “essence” that served as the foundation of his early work. For our purposes, however, “essence” serves an important function in that it does not promote a deeper understanding of the two religions but leads to further distancing of one from the other.63 It is in liberal Judaism where this distance is so crucial, because it had in so many ways modeled itself after Protestantism and, through its adaption of Jesus as a Jewish teacher, had made its emancipatory case to Western Europe.64 This difference required a severing of Judaism from any and all Christological roots. Boyarin and Schäfer’s work in late antiquity, Wolfson’s work in Kabbalah, and the present book on Hasidism challenge that premise. Unlike Schoeps, Baeck took the Jewish mystical tradition seriously (he rarely dealt with Hasidism) and attempted to integrate it into his theory that Judaism represents the “perfect unity” of mystery and commandment.65 Below I offer a selected reading of his seminal essay on these matters, “Romantic Religion,” in an attempt to show that Baeck’s evaluation of Christianity as a romantic religion could just as easily be a critique of Hasidism.66 It is important to note that Baeck’s postwar shift of view on the importance of Jewish mysticism is not about mysticism in general. Alexander Altmann noted, “What did change in Baeck was his specific view of Jewish mysticism. . . . It seems that the emergence of the new trend had caused him to take a closer look at the mystical tradition of Judaism, and that, much to his surprise, he found it to differ from all other forms of mysticism.”67 In fact Baeck’s entire assessment of Jewish mysticism was founded on the premise that it constitutes a unique form of

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mysticism.68 Altmann wrote, “Only the Jewish people, Baeck points out, has the peculiar gift, the special genius for embracing the mystery and the commandments in one single glance; to experience the metaphysical as an imperative, as ‘commanding mystery.’”69 Baeck seemed wedded to an essentialist notion of Judaism carried over from his earlier period and retained in his apologetic later writings. Ignoring the subversive dimensions of Kabbalah or Hasidism, which he was surely aware of insofar as Scholem had already explored them in depth, Baeck used romanticism to undermine the beliefs of liberal Protestants that theirs was the religion of “ethical monotheism” as well as claims that Jewish mysticism did not succumb to the failings of romantic religion.70 He argued that Jewish mysticism functions within the sphere of “ethical religion,” making “ethical man a cosmic being as well.”71 Further, he argued that unlike other forms of mysticism, Kabbalah is not world denying. “The special feature of Jewish mysticism is precisely that it never ceases to be ethical, all the forces of the world are forces of the will, forces for the fulfillment of the commandment.”72 This depiction of Kabbalah as “ethical” in nature might not stand up to a close reading of Hasidism’s “romantic” core that, in the years after Baeck’s death, became a driving force in postwar Judaism. There are a number of elements endemic to romanticism that Baeck returned to repeatedly in his essay. They include the category of race, which he calls “modernized pneuma,”73 disinterest in the worldly matters of politics and the ethical, sacrifice of the intellect, centrality of a charismatic figure, marginalization of law, and the transition from law to sacrament. Each of these could easily apply to Hasidism and, in fact, have been so applied by its many detractors.74 Baeck wrote that romanticism awakened “‘racial scholasticism’ with its doctrine of salvation, with its system of grace, and with its faith that this grace works through the dark abysses of the blood—this modernized pneuma—and gives the chosen everything.” The focus on blood or the essential quality of the Jewish body was, of course, a central characteristic of Kabbalah and subsequently Hasidism. It had its most popular expression in Habad Hasidism’s Sefer ha-Tanya with its claim that only the Jew has a “divine soul” (neshama elohit) while gentiles only have an “animal soul” (nefesh behamit) but the idea also filters through much of the Jewish mystical tradition.75 While soul inheritance is not racial per se (that is, in Lurianic doctrine a Jewish soul can be trapped in a gentile body and needs to be redeemed through conversion), it does lend itself to racial and biological distinctions. This is one example where Baeck’s Judaism conceals the much darker perspective of Kabbalah.76

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The two final points of romanticism (that is, Christianity) in Baeck that relate to Hasidism are the centrality of the charismatic and the place of sacrament. Romantic faith requires establishing authority as its necessary complement in this world. It is like an internal balance, but also like a psychic retribution, that this romantic faith, which began by repudiating any definite law so that it might follow unrestrained feeling, must in the end get to the point where it seeks an authority in matters of faith. . . . Romantic faith has always been, or become, papal; that is to become truth for it, something always had to be prevalent truth, guaranteed by a firm authority.77

Even given the problems in this statement regarding liberal Protestantism, a religious community largely void of saints, Baeck succeeds in pointing out the extent to which in Christianity the law as text is replaced by the law as person, Jesus Christ.78 Even setting aside the centrality of zaddikism and the authoritative function of the rebbe in Hasidism or the more general notion of Daas Torah (the authoritative advice of contemporary Torah sages) in non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodoxy, classical Kabbalah subtly reverses the Deuteronomic trajectory from person (Moses) to text (Torah), never moving as far as the logos theology of John in uniting word and flesh, but surely going much farther than Baeck would feel comfortable doing.79 One could defend Baeck here by claiming that while Hasidism exhibits a tendency toward romanticism, it still remains wedded to the dominance of commandment over mystery. That is, Hasidism does retain allegiance to ­halakha (Jewish law) even given its romantic flourishes. While this is surely true, one must look a bit deeper to see how Hasidism understands the law it lives by, how it constructs halakha as a vehicle for religious experience (devekut).80 Baeck claimed that all romantic religion must bring the experience down to earth. Paul, he avers, did this through “sacraments.” “That romanticism on the other hand, on which Paul drew, had followed higher paths. It had taught the sacraments—that is, the means of grace and blessedness, meals which always produce a union of the deity with the human being—so that the miracle of the experience can, by means of them, be made objectively effective day after day.”81 The sacrament is thus the act or ritual that concretizes the experience and also serves as a vehicle for the continuation of that experience. It is romanticism manifest in this world. Closer to Baeck, Buber defined the Hasidic notion of the law as sacrament in order to distinguish it from the dry legalism that he claimed plagued non-Hasidic Judaism at the time. He stated that “the divine

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and the human join with each other without merging with each other, a life beyond transcendence-and-immanence, is the foremost significance of sacrament.”82 This, Buber said, is precisely the religiosity of Hasidism. But Buber went further: In Judaism, a tendency toward sacramental life has always been powerful. The fact—which can be proved against other views—that there is hardly a Christian sacrament that has not had a sacramental or semisacramental Jewish antecedent is not decisive here. But what is decisive is that always, even in the talmudic period, masters of an unmistakable sacramental form of existence appear, men, therefore, in whose existence, in whose whole life-attitude, in whose experiences and actions the consecration of the covenant is fully operative.”83

Buber did not want to view Hasidism as an aberration but rather a fulfillment of a long history of Jewish covenantal piety, from the Hebrew prophets through the Enlightenment, that was interrupted by rationalization and symbolicization. Buber did not, however, connect the notion of Hasidic sacramentalism to Christianity. Baeck’s position comes through even more clearly when he offers his assessment of “Judaism” and law in the same passage. Judaism, too, has created its ceremonies, perhaps even too great a profusion of them; but here they were erected only as the outworks of the religion, as a “fence around the doctrine,” as the ancient saying puts it: they are symbols and signs which point to something religious, but their observation as such was not yet considered true piety, not yet a good work.84

To describe Jewish law as a symbol or sign is to ignore completely the elaborate ways both Kabbalah and Hasidism view law as sacrament, the way each uses mitzvah as a vehicle for a real encounter between the human and the divine, between the lower realms and the higher realm by elevating the lower realms to their sources above. In Buber’s words, “Sacramental covenant means the life of unity with the unity.”85 This notion of unity stands behind the whole structure of kabbalistic piety. Buber cultivates the romanticism of Hasidism and tries to sever it from its metaphysical and doctrinal moorings to see it as an example of an existential approach to religiosity. If we are looking for categorical distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, sacramentalism simply will not do. And, closer to our interest, Buber claimed that Hasidism exposes in an unabashed manner the core expression of sacramentalism in Judaism—he called it Hasidic “pansacramentalism”—even more so than Kabbalah.

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Baeck’s “Romantic Religion,” far from being severed from Judaism, in many ways lies at the very heart of mystical Judaism in general and Hasidism in particular. While Baeck tried to offer a reading of Kabbalah, he did not consider the ways in which Kabbalah—and perhaps even more strongly Hasidism— are exemplars of the romantic religion he constructed to refute Christianity.86 Some of the very dimensions Baeck argued are absent in Judaism, however, appear in various forms in the literature of Hasidism. Schoeps and Baeck exhibited the ways in which Jewish thinkers in the early decades of the twentieth century addressed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. High Christology and the ideas that underpin it, such as divine incarnation and the preexistence of the messiah, were viewed as anathema, lying outside the Jewish sources of Christianity. The division between the synoptic Gospels (as Jewish) and Paul (as Hellenistic), an idea rooted in some forms of liberal Protestantism at the time, became a central tenet of liberal German Jewish theology. It was not simply that thinkers such as Schoeps and Baeck did not think incarnation was endemic to Judaism; they simply could not think so. I now turn to Michael Wyschogrod and Elliot Wolfson, two scholars with very different approaches to the roots of Jewish incarnational thinking. Neither man worked primarily in the historical perspective of the first and second century CE, when a systemic reassessment was underway, but they offer philosophical and text-based approaches to the Jewish literary tradition that subvert the tenets of Schoeps and Baeck.

IV Wyschogrod and Wolfson are a study in contrasts. Wyschogrod is a self-­ described “Jewish Barthian.”87 An Orthodox Jew in practice, he prefers to define his Judaism as “biblical.”88 He eschews much of Jewish philosophy, holding a particular animus for Maimonides,89 and believes that the central text for Judaism is not the rabbinic corpus but the Hebrew Bible: “the basic data with which I work are scriptural.”90 In some way he espouses an anti-liberal attitude similar to that of Schoeps (who was not a defender of Orthodoxy but very much a liberal critic of liberalism and was also very indebted to Barth). Wyschogrod and Schoeps both consider themselves “biblical Jews,” although Wyschogrod seems comfortable, while Schoeps is not, in including tradition (rabbinic and otherwise) as a category in his “biblical” thinking whenever the rabbis’ beliefs accorded with his biblical view. He does so because he believes that Orthodox

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Judaism has retained more of the Hebrew Bible in its belief and ritual life than any other form of Judaism.91 Schoeps believed Paul’s critique of the law should remain operative in Judaism if only to keep alive the tension that he deems necessary for the survival of Judaism’s revelatory message. Wyschogrod thinks along similar lines, reading Paul not as a critic of the law, at least not for Jews, but as offering an alternative covenantal experience for the gentile to become an adopted member of the biblical covenant. Wyschogrod’s major work, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (1983), is an extended study of biblical theology focused on the notion of divine corporeality as an alternative to the radically transcendent God. This idea of a radically transcendent God was perhaps best concretized in Maimonides and became the sine qua non of subsequent non-mystical Judaism. Wyschogrod shows little interest in the Jewish mystical tradition, preferring the faith-based theology of revelation as the “truth” made famous by Barth. His work also does not concern itself with history, and a close reader is often startled by the way he freely uses the term “­Judaism” as if it constitutes a single transhistorical entity. It is not that he is unaware of the historical complexity of the Jewish religion; rather, like Barth’s criticism of the more historical German theologian Rudolph Bultmann, in making his theological arguments Wyschogrod prefers to work in less complex categories. Wolfson’s work is an expression of the highest form of scholarship in Judaica. His work exhibits a deep historical and contextual understanding of the tradition and the hermeneutical acumen that complicates rather than resolves or simplifies theological issues.92 He does not write as a partisan or activist but as a scholar of the Western tradition (his work includes extended discussions of Buddhism and Hinduism as well). Although his breadth of vision extends from the Hebrew Bible to postmodernity (particularly in his work on Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Edith Wyschogrod), his central interest is the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah and Hasidism.93 It is this tradition that drives Wolfson’s intellectual project. One of his major contributions to scholarship has been to show the extent to which the borders between religions are continuously traversed by the Jewish mystical tradition and mystical religion. The categories of orthodoxy and heresy that came to define medieval Judaism simply cannot bear the weight of a close and careful reading of Kabbalah. Wyschogrod is less interested in the verity of the doctrinal constructs of Christology than the ways Jews and Christians understand and live in the distinctions that exist between them. That is, he is interested in ways to construct

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conditions for dialogue that enable both sides to maintain the integrity of their own traditions. He is very much like Schoeps or Baeck in his intent. Unlike either of them, however, Wyschogrod is not a conventional apologist for Judaism. He is willing to acknowledge that the categorical distinctions between the two religions do not hold up if the Bible is taken as the central text, which not only affirms divine corporeality but is founded on it. It is not simply that Judaism and Christianity share the Bible; it is that the Bible holds within it the basic tenets of both religions, including divine corporeality, and that Judaism’s obsession to separate itself from Christianity distances Judaism from the Bible. Wolfson is devoted to the exploration of the metaphysical and cosmological precepts that underlie Christianity and mystical Judaism but is less concerned about how they are interpreted in the lived religions of Jews and Christians. He illustrates the extent to which mystics are unconcerned with borders and differences, especially when they can function outside the orbit of theological contestation. He shows that even when kabbalists criticize Christianity they often replicate it, knowingly or not. Wyschogrod and Wolfson epitomize new Jewish thinking on Judaism and Christianity that complements the work of Boyarin, Schäfer, and others. Wyschogrod is devoted to undermining what he considers the Maimonidean paradigm of modern Judaism often associated with the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen.94 By this he means the movement in modern Judaism to conceptualize a God who radically transcends the world, a God whose indwelling in the Hebrew Bible is to be considered metaphorical at most. While there has been resistance to the notion of radical transcendence in thinkers such as Buber, Rosenzweig, and Heschel, to say nothing of the popularizers of Kabbalah, the Cohenian project remains the template for modern progressive Judaism.95 Previous attempts to attenuate or revise Cohen’s modern Maimonideanism do not, in Wyschogrod’s mind, return us to authentic biblical theology but continue to dwell in the orbit of the non-biblical and thus, in his mind, inauthentic, Jewish thinking. Of Buber, whose position may have been closest to Wyschogrod’s, he writes, For Buber, this is the divinity of God, that he cannot be reduced to the level of an object, as can every other person. Buber breaks decisively with the God of the philosophers and affirms the living God of the Bible. Yet, without realizing it, Buber remains tied to the Jewish philosophic tradition, with its stress on the immateriality and unity of God, unity interpreted metaphysically so as to remove effectively the living God from the realm of human conception.”96

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Wyschogrod claims that Jewish thought is so infected with Maimonidean ideas that it is simply cannot impart what, for him, is clear in the Bible: “The God of the Bible is a person.”97 Even the Kabbalah needs to reify the personality of God into cosmic tropes that offer what Wolfson calls “imaginal” embodiment. And Buber, whose theology of relation was bound to personhood, had to make God “immaterial” in order to decorporealize what the Bible depicts as a “person.” Wyschogrod’s many comments about Kabbalah in his The Body of Faith point to a recognition of the corporeality of God in this mystical doctrine, but it takes scholars such as Wolfson to tease out fully the extent of Kabbalah’s notion of divine embodiment. Wyschogrod’s use for kabbalistic literature is merely as a contrast to Jewish philosophical thinking.98 Wyschogrod’s position on the origin and extent of the Maimonidean matrix is worth examining because he views it largely as a product of a continued attempt to distance Judaism from Christianity in an era where they seem closer than ever. The natural tendency has been for Jews to view Christianity as a foreign faith whose otherness is nowhere displayed more clearly than in the teachings of the Trinity and the incarnation. Focusing exclusively on the discontinuity between the two faiths, Judaism and Christianity have become more and more estranged, with little effort on either side to supplement the element of discontinuity with the significant dimensions of continuity that must not be ignored. . . . The effect has been a kind of polarization. The more Christianity has moved in an incarnational direction, the more Judaism moved in a transcendental direction. . . . In short, there has been a tendency to transform the God of the Bible into the God of the philosophers. . . . I am firmly convinced that this does not constitute a service to Judaism. I am not arguing that this tendency is solely the result of a recoil from Christian ideas. But it is at least partly that, and we have here a situation in which both faiths have damaged one another.99

The integration and deepening of the Maimonidean/Cohenian matrix as a reaction to renewed interest among Christian thinkers in theology as opposed to history, or high Christology as opposed to the Jewish Jesus, is an interesting way of defining certain earlier Jewish thinking about Christianity represented by Baeck and Schoeps.100 Wyschogrod is clear that Jews simply cannot accept high Christology. “A human being who is also God loses all Jewish legitimacy from the outset. No sharper break with Jewish theological sensibility can be

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imagined.”101 Yet reacting to high Christology by abandoning the “personality of God” in the Hebrew Bible in favor of the radically transcendent God of Maimonides is lamentable, in Wyschogrod’s view, because it not only distances Jews from the source of their covenantal tradition but brings them closer to atheism. “[Maimonides] apparently did not consider the danger of an overly rarified God who is so beyond all conception that he cannot be distinguished from no god at all.”102 While radical transcendence may not have produced atheism in a medieval society where belief in God remained paramount, in modernity, Wyschogrod suggests, the difference between an unknowable, radically transcendent God and no God at all seems nominal.103 For Wyschogrod, Jews must distinguish between a high Christology they reject and a divine corporeality they must accept as integral to the biblical worldview. The reactive way in which Jews distance themselves from their source text (the Hebrew Bible) so as to not give any credence to Christian theological claims is indicative of precisely what Wyschogrod is trying to undo. In a society dominated by Protestant theology unrelentingly critical of Judaism, there was little room in pre–World War II Germany for Jewish thinkers to grant Christianity the theological legitimacy it deserves, at least according to Wyschogrod. Rosenzweig, too, moves in this direction in his Star of Redemption but only after making it quite clear that the theological foundations of Christianity show less fidelity to the Bible than his rendering of Judaism. For Rosenzweig, Judaism is the most authentic biblical religion. Christianity is a lower form that includes a universalist component that could aid Judaism in its goal of bringing its message to the world. Wyschogrod does not traffic in the hierarchical evaluation of each religion, although he does claim that Christianity, specifically that of Paul, is a religion that is more philosophic by nature (for him this is not praise). “The first reason, then, for the more organic relation of philosophy to Christianity is the fact that Christianity came into being in a world in which the philosophic consciousness was highly developed, while Judaism, being much older, is born into a prephilosophic world.”104 This formulation reverses philosophical Judaism’s contention of the opposite, that Christianity, with theological precepts drawn largely from mythic and Gnostic mystery religions of the Hellenistic world, is less sophisticated than the transcendent “ethical” monotheism of the Hebrew Bible.105 Wyschogrod errs in that he hews to the largely debunked conventional wisdom of Judaism being much older than Christianity when, in fact, both likely emerged at virtually the same time (the second century CE).106 That said, it may

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be the case that Paul was more philosophically sophisticated than his rabbinic contemporaries and that that rabbinic sages, for other reasons, had less interest in the Hellenistic world where philosophy was embedded. Wyschogrod’s project does not require the defensive posture that Baeck and Schoeps assumed. In line with Luther and Barth, Wyschogrod believes it was this philosophic influence that severed biblical religion from the Bible.107 He moves beyond the reactive mode by arguing that even if Jews must reject the Christian articulation of incarnation, they need not, should not, can not, reject the notion of divine corporeality upon which it is based. “Both faiths thus struggle with God’s relationship to the material order; one, by a Torah that regulates the material order but keeps God out of that order; the other, by preaching salvation through faith and not by works of the law but depicting a God who has become man.”108 God dwells in the body of Israel. While such a phrase would not be anathema to the rabbinic sages (that is, the divine dwells among those who study Torah), Wyschogrod seems to mean it in a biological and not metaphorical or rhetorical sense. This is for him a fundamental biblical precept. Jewishness and divine election are primarily about biology. “The biological being of this people therefore comes first.”109 To deny the indwelling of God in the body of Israel, to deny that God is, in the Bible, a person, to deny that God can dwell in the flesh, for Wyschogrod, is nothing less than denying the Hebrew Bible. The operative distinction Wyschogrod makes between Judaism and Christianity is between “God’s dwelling in the midst of or even in the flesh of Israel and God becoming flesh.”110 This is not an insignificant distinction, but it is arguably a distinction in degree and not in kind. Wyschogrod comes close to making this explicit when he writes, My claim is that the Christian teaching of the incarnation of God in Jesus is the intensification of the teaching of the indwelling of God in Israel by concentrating that indwelling in one Jew rather than leaving it diffused in the people of J­ esus as a whole. From my perspective, such a severing of any Jew from his people is a mistake because, biblically, God’s covenantal partner is always the people Israel and not an individual Jew.111

This challenges the theological assumption that Judaism and Christianity are categorically different on theological and not only historical grounds. Wyschogrod rejects the link of ethics that binds the two religions together, noting caustically “Ethics is the Judaism of the assimilated,” reflecting, perhaps, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s famous quip that “history is the religion of the

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fallen Jew.”112 For Wyschogrod the theology of the Bible not only enables but in fact requires a belief in divine corporeality, though not incarnation. Making categorical theological distinctions between Judaism and Christianity in response to the attacks against Judaism in effect further distances Judaism from its source. It is only by returning to the Bible, to some form of incarnational thinking, that Judaism can save itself from its philosophical detour. The doctrine of incarnation thus separates Jews and Christians but, properly understood, also sheds light on incarnational elements in Judaism which are more diffuse that the Christian version but nevertheless very real. If the Christian move was a mistake—and I believe it was—it was a mistake that has helped better understand a dimension of Judaism—God’s indwelling in the people ­Israel—that I would probably not have understood as clearly without the Christian mistake.”113

Here Wyschogrod almost inverts Rosenzweig’s confession. Rosenzweig thought a proper apprehension of Judaism would enable Christianity to understand better its role in the redemptive monotheistic project. For Wyschogrod, it is Christianity’s mistake—perhaps an overextension of divine indwelling—that discloses Judaism’s error in distancing itself from the biblical God in favor of the philosophic God of Maimonides. Wyschogrod thinks recognizing Christianity’s error but accepting its basic premise can save Judaism from philosophy. In place of the theological rejection of incarnation, Wyschogrod posits a narratological distinction. If Judaism cannot accept incarnation it is because it does not hear this story, because the Word of God as it hears it does not tell it and because Jewish faith does not testify to it. And if the Church does accept incarnation, it is not because it somehow discovered that such an event had to occur given the nature of God, or of being, reality, or anything else, but because it hears that this was God’s free and gracious decision, a decision not predictable by humankind.114

For Wyschogrod, the God of the Bible, God as a “person,” is a free and sovereign actor. If He chooses to reveal Himself in one form to one people and another form to another, that is God’s choice. Both revelations are founded on a similar premise, the indwelling of God. One has God dwelling in a people, the other has God becoming flesh. Judaism and Christianity stand on identical theological ground yet render that ground differently in their respective narratives. There is nothing that negates high Christology for Jews other than the

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fact that it is not their story. Taking away the theological barriers separating Judaism and Christianity, Wyschogrod seeks to maintain perhaps an irreconcilable distinction, but one that is founded on a shared biblical premise. The attempt to justify one articulation over another philosophically only serves to distance both from their original shared source. These shared premises of divine indwelling that Wyschogrod emphasizes do not result in an acceptance of the Christian doctrine of incarnation, but they do illustrate an example of what I am calling incarnational thinking in Judaism. This is in part due to the fact that, not under the Christian gaze, ­Hasidic masters were better able to interpret medieval kabbalistic notions of divine embodiment without the caution characteristic of many modern Jewish theologians. It is with Wolfson’s analysis of incarnational thinking in medieval Kabbalah that our book essentially stakes its claim. The Hasidic doctrine of incarnation was obviously not drawn from Christian sources but from its particular reading of classical Kabbalah. Yet it emerged at the time Judaism was beginning to construct its doctrinal frame or, as Leora Batnitzky prefers, its formation of Judaism as “religion.” Much of the project of modern Judaism is founded on Judaism distinguishing itself from Christianity yet doing so in a way that enables an argument for Judaism’s inclusion in enlightened Europe. While not often viewed as an integral part of Batnitzky’s “Judaism as religion,” Hasidism developed at the same time and in many cases responded to the social and political changes that were having an impact on Judaism in Eastern Europe. Moreover, Hasidism took this mystical doctrine outside the closed circle of mystical adepts and translated it for a popular audience (this was one of the major complaints of anti-Hasidic forces in the late eighteenth century). Metaphysical ideas difficult to comprehend became cultural resources for practice and customs, offering an alternative vision of Judaism to the one portrayed by Western European Jews of the Enlightenment who wanted Judaism simultaneously to look like Christianity yet distinguish itself from it. Wolfson’s position on the question of incarnation in Judaism is more difficult to decipher than Wyschogrod’s because Wolfson works with a complex array of Western philosophical, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and kabbalistic texts. If Wyschogrod presents his position along what one might call the plain-sense continuum of a Barthian biblical theologian—for example, God is a person in the Bible because he is presented as such—Wolfson takes the opposite tack. He argues that we have to excavate beneath words and images to

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reveal a vision of embodiment, what he calls God’s “imaginal body,” and understand the ways in which the sages and kabbalists who denigrated incarnation and Christianity engaged in adaptations and articulations of those ideas. That is, a kind of Freudian supposition is required to explore the vicissitudes of the kabbalistic unconscious in order to uncover the anxiety of influence whereby incarnational thinking underpins the Kabbalah’s rendering of Judaism.115 In my examination of Wolfson’s work on incarnation below, I refrain from entering into the intricacies of his hermeneutical analysis, which would require a separate study, but attempt to tease out some observations about the constructivist nature of his project; that is, what his work suggests regarding the postwar American context and how can it inform new explorations of Judaism and Christianity within the body of Jewish literature. We begin with the important question of nomenclature: I am well aware that the incarnational tropes to be extracted from Jewish texts are distinct from and in opposition to the Christian formulations; indeed, in my estimation, it is the disparity that justifies the use of the same nomenclature. This is not to deny the adverse portrayal of Christians by Jews and Jews by Christians. However, the rejection of the “other” does not mean the other has no impact on the formation of one’s own sense of self; on the contrary, condemnation of the other bespeaks contiguity with the other, and this is so even when the other has preached intolerance or perpetuated violence in the sociopolitical arena. By utilizing the term “incarnation” in explicating kabbalistic texts I do not mean to paint a monolithic picture. Precisely by deploying one term to ponder disparate phenomena I call attention to the rift that both unifies and splits the two.116

Nomenclature looms so large here because it prompts a much more complex discussion about the nature of cultural translation, how words should and should not be used outside their cultural milieu.117 Scholars of Kabbalah often must use terminology foreign to the texts they read to describe one or another phenomenon. Weighty terminology such as “incarnation,” some argue, transcends its ability to describe anything outside itself. Wolfson uses the term “incarnation” specifically and fully aware of the critique of his doing so, yet he argues that using it is precisely what enables seeing both sameness and difference. In his book Ben: On Sonship in Jewish Mysticism, Idel challenges Wolfson, me, and others on the question of whether the term “incarnation” is appropriate for the study of the kabbalistic literature of divine embodiment.118 Wolfson

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­ egins to respond by suggesting that while the terminology is indeed embedded b in Christian discourse and rejected by Jewish thinkers, it is precisely for that reason that its usage is appropriate. Using such nomenclature better enables us not to be fooled by the kabbalist’s denigration of Christianity while they appear to utilize some of its basic premises. Both are true. When we say “incarnation” in a kabbalistic context we know what we are not saying, yet in addition we are awakened to the ways in which the term describes the phenomenon we are seeing on the page. Without using “incarnation” it would too easily go unnoticed. For those who would like to maintain the categorical distinction between Judaism and Christianity on theological and metaphysical grounds, that is precisely the point. Here is one place where Wolfson’s Freudianism comes into play. He puts it this way: “Precisely by deploying one term to ponder disparate phenomena I call attention to the rift that both unifies and splits the two.” Elsewhere he makes this point more explicit: “By reclaiming the significance of incarnation in the history of Judaism . . . one can simultaneously acknowledge the common ground between Judaism and Christianity and the uniqueness of this doctrine in each religious culture.”119 The acknowledgement of sameness and difference, or perhaps difference through sameness, may be one of the salient shifts in the examination of Judaism and Christianity in contemporary scholarship. But if Judaism rejects the one-time, word-becoming-flesh incarnation in Jesus Christ, the “Christ event,” what is “incarnation” in these texts? Wolfson focuses on at least two dimensions: first, the role of the imagination in Jewish mysticism as something real, efficacious, and embedded in human consciousness. To imagine a God embodied is arguably as real, perhaps more real, for the kabbalists than Jesus incarnate. And second, the correlation between the rabbinic logos theology of God as Torah combined with the creative power and its embodiment in the human. “Just as early Christian exegetes saw in Christ, God made flesh, so the rabbis conceived of the Torah as the incarnation of the image of God. . . . It follows, therefore, that insofar as the Torah is the embodiment of the divine image, the sage can be considered the incarnational representation of God.”120 Elsewhere we read a more poetic rendition: Pitched in the heartland of Christian faith, one encounters the logocentric belief in the incarnation of the word in the flesh of the person Jesus, whereas in the textual panoramas of medieval kabbalah, the sight of the incarnational insight is the ontographic inscripting of flesh into word and the consequent conversion of the carnal body into the ethereal, luminous body, finally transposed into the literal body, the body that is the letter, hyperliterally, the name that is the Torah.

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. . . [F]or Christians, the literal body is embodied in the book of the body; for Jews, the literal body is embodied in the body of the book.121

The inversion of word-flesh to flesh-word that Wolfson describes points to the ways in which Jews—for whom the book (Torah) replaced the person (Moses) in the Deuteronomic school—remain wedded to that notion even as they traverse those boundaries.122 Consequently, the erasure of somatic barriers separating the world from God continues to play itself out. To reject Christian incarnation is not to reject its structure but rather its articulation. Categorical difference is replaced by semantic or perhaps contextual difference. Here the words of Jacob Neusner, the scholar of religion and Judaism, are helpful in describing Rabbinic Judaism when he writes that Christian incarnation is a “particular framing” of an idea endemic to Rabbinic Judaism. For Neusner, that idea is “anthropomorphism.”123 Wyschogrod claims that theologically the idea of anthropomorphism cannot be abandoned if fidelity to the Hebrew Bible is to be maintained. For the kabbalists, per Wolfson, anthropomorphism is a lens through which they construct notions of mystical experience and divine embodiment. For Neusner, it is biblical anthropomorphism that makes Christian incarnation possible. In line with Wyschogrod, Wolfson acknowledges an inherent tension in classical Judaism between the “iconic” or bodily depiction of God in the Bible and the aniconism that made its way into later strata of the biblical corpus, for example, Deutero-Isaiah, and then underwent a process of normalization in rabbinic literature (perhaps, as Schäfer suggests, partly in resistance to Christianity).124 This distancing continued into the Middle Ages, culminating in what I call the Maimonidean paradigm. It is true that in these centuries Kabbalah continued and even went through its most formative period, but its larger impact on normative Judaism, at least in Europe, would still take some time.125 Wolfson notes that the rabbinic sages and later mystics were acutely aware of the tension and sought to explore it in ways that did not simply marginalize the “visibility” or “visualization” of God. For them and their spiritual progeny, that would have been too high a price. On classical Judaism, Wolfson writes, “Even though the rabbis clearly would not have articulated an incarnational theology in the kind affirmed by Christianity, they attempted in their own way to keep alive the theophanic traditions attested in Scripture.”126 That is, the rabbis, unlike Maimonides, were not willing to abandon anthropomorphism but redirected it away from the fleshly incarnation of Christ into an “imaginal body” of God that could be accessed through prayer and ritual.127 “Fulfillment

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of the commandments facilitates the transformation of the carnal body into the textual body of Torah, a state of psychosomatic equilibrium wherein the body becomes the perfect vehicle to execute the will of the soul and the soul becomes the perfect guide in directing the will of the body.”128 The kabbalists, who worked in a time when the Maimonidean paradigm was in full force, developed the propensity for embodiment even further, although they too dwelled mostly in an imaginative realm that was more real for them than the empirical. In Wolfson’s words, “the rabbinic notion of incarnation embraces the paradox that God’s body is physical only to the extent that it is mental and it is mental only to the extent that it is physical.”129 Wolfson iterates a distinction between the prohibition depicting God in images (idolatry) and the claim that God cannot be manifest in a body (incarnation).130 This serves as a central pillar of his early approach to incarnation, which is developed further in Language, Eros, Being (2005). This distinction complicates the simplistic rejection of high Christology (the very facticity of incarnation, that is, that God can take bodily form) and at the same time reinforces the rejection of the later Christian iconicization of Jesus as part of its worship. In fact this distinction allows for the continued affirmation of the anthropomorphism of God that is “not taken simply as figurative or metaphorical,” but imaginal.131 Or, in Neusner’s felicitous formulation, “Anthropomorphism forms the genus of which incarnation constitutes a species.”132 In order to dig deeper into what Wolfson means by the “imaginal” we must turn to his Language, Eros, Being. This book is structured as a series of complex hermeneutical meditations on various dimensions of the human condition, both in terms of self-understanding and the human relationship to the (imagined) divine. Wolfson draws from Western philosophical literature, Jewish mystical sources, Sufism, Christianity, and Buddhism to explore how all these intellectual and spiritual traditions coalesce around themes of secrecy, embodiment, language, and experience. The chapter most relevant to our concerns is “Flesh Become Word: Textual Embodiment and Poetic Incarnation,” based on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His is a phenomenological approach that focuses among other things on “the incarnate subjectivity of human perception [that] can be described in optical terms as the double openness of body to world and world to body, embodied consciousness of conscious embodiment, the reciprocity of ‘proximal’ vision based on the presumed synergy between bodies.”133 In general Wolfson employs Merleau-Ponty’s category of the “incarnate subject” to provide a theoretical basis for understanding how the ­kabbalistic imagines

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the imagination, how the notion of the incarnate word of the book (Torah) is imagined as the body that brings divinity into the world and, through Torah, enables the contemplative to fully experience how they too are incarnate with that word. More specifically, for the kabbalists the fulfillment of the commandments transforms the body into the word, reversing the Christological formula of the word becoming flesh while maintaining its ideational structure. Merleau-Ponty thus provides the contemporary ear a rhetoric to articulate anew the ancient kabbalistic hermeneutic of secrecy: The invisible is not an object of metaphysics—the transcendental other, ideal form, immaterial substance, or even astral body—nor is it to be identified as a metaphysical subject—the eye of mind/heart presumed to see what is beneath the veneer of appearance; it is, rather, the chasm between subject and object, the mark of divergence, noncoincidence, ontological in-difference.134

This is all an attempt to view the kabbalistic enterprise as something other than allegory or literalism, something that exists outside the binaries of the physical and spiritual, corporeal and incorporeal, real and imagined. Wolfson prefers the term “poetics” to describe what the kabbalists are after. In typical medieval fashion, kabbalists maintained that the spiritual is discerned through the physical, a cosmological principle that shaped their hermeneutic, as the hidden meaning of the text was thought to be discovered through its literal body, the body that is letter; mystical gnosis thus entails, according to the locution of one zoharic passage, a seeing of the secret “through the garment” (mi-go livusha) rather than by removing the garment.135

The intertwining of the physical and spiritual or, borrowing Wolfson’s locution, “the comingling of the metaphysical and the physical”—is common in kabbalistic discourse.136 Wolfson wants to take it further, to explore the phenomenological and incarnational consequences of such an approach. While the kabbalists speak of the spiritual in the physical they simultaneously maintain the Neoplatonic negative appraisal of the body, and we must understand how these tropes can function in tandem. Wolfson notices that while the “body” is portrayed in a negative light, kabbalists frequently use anthropomorphic (bodily) images to depict the divine. For example, what are we to make of the fact that the sixteenth-century kabbalist Moses Cordovero considered the body of the righteous individual a surrogate for the Jerusalem Temple.137 If we can take such comments as simply metaphorical or heuristic, the kabbalistic imagi-

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nation could be collapsed into a kind of Maimonidean resolution to the biblical problem of anthropomorphism, something the kabbalists vehemently opposed. Wolfson suggests that we view “body” in Kabbalah more generally in a linguistic form that denotes “the corporeal as lived presence” though language, specifically the language of Scripture. God’s “body” is God’s word, language serving as the matter and creative energy of creation and creativity. Discussing a passage from the early Hasidic master Jacob Joseph of Polnoye in his essay on the Jewish apostate Immanuel Frommann, Wolfson similarly writes, The pietistic ideal is based on perceiving the immanence of the divine in all things, but this perception, in turn, rests on contemplating the spiritual luminosity clothed in the letters so that the base physicality morphs into the semiotic body, the body whose limbs are the letters comprised in the alef, the wisdom (hokhma) or thought (mahshavah) that is the root of all the alphabetic ciphers and hence the ontic source of all being (alufo shel olam), the oneness of infinity (ahdut ha-eyn sof ).138

The kabbalistic assumption regarding the true nature of the corporeal is more than the rhetorical description of God dwelling among study partners found in the rabbinic tradition. For the kabbalists in question, there is something real in the imaginal that should not be underestimated. Such a perspective reverses the generally assumed allegorical approach to scriptural anthropomorphisms promoted by medieval rabbinic exegetes, for instead of explaining anthropomorphic characterizations of God as a figurative way to accommodate human understanding, the attribution of corporeal images to an incorporeal God indicates that the real body, the body in its most abstract tangibility, is the letter, a premise that I shall call the principle of poetic incarnation. When examined from the kabbalistic perspective, anthropomorphism in the canonical text of Scripture indicates that human and divine corporeality are entwined in a mesh of double imaging through the mirror of the text that renders the divine body human and the human body divine.139

Here Wolfson focuses on Joseph Hamadan (an early fourteenth-century Castilian kabbalist), who viewed the Torah as the embodiment of divine glory (kavod Hashem) and the Zoharic corpus that subverts the rabbinic phrase gufei torah (lit. “the body of Torah,” referring to the commandments) to mean “the textual body of God.”140 For Wolfson, these linkages are not simply creative interpretive ways of navigating anthropomorphism but, in fact, foundational to the entire

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kabbalistic notion of divine corporeality. God as word is not simply embedded in Torah in a metaphorical sense but incarnated in Torah in a phenomenological manner, manifest in the imaginal real that is no less real than empirical flesh. And these letters that are God’s “body” are then embedded/embodied in Israel.141 Regarding the mystical doctrine of Menahem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, Wolfson writes, “the material is dematerialized to the point that bodiliness is conceived of as nothing but the incarnation of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet comprised in the ineffable name. The carnality of the world is tied to the flesh of the word through which the void acquires a presence in the absence of the void.”142 Important in Wolfson’s approach is his claim that conflating all this to the historical influence (from Judaism to Christianity / from Christianity to Judaism) is to miss the basic phenomenological point regarding incarnation. Notwithstanding the legitimacy of this rather obvious though regrettably neglected avenue to explain the transmission of Christian creed to masters of Jewish esoteric lore in European cities and towns, I would contend that the issue need not be restricted to historical influence, whether through text or image. Far more important is the logical inevitability that speculation of this sort will invariably yield a mythopoetic representation of the literal body, that is, the body that literally is literal, the body that is letter, an analogical literalism that accounts for the phenomenological resemblance between kabbalah and Christianity, a resemblance exploited—but not concocted—by Christian kabbalists in the Renaissance.143

Wolfson is suggesting that both Jews and Christians, who throughout history have shared ideas both consciously and unconsciously, nonetheless derive their respective notions of incarnation largely through the inevitable consequence of taking biblical anthropomorphism seriously and rejecting its marginalization through allegorical interpretation. Rabbinic and post-rabbinic Jews lived in an orbit where the text was fully centralized as the locus of spiritual attention, whereas early Christianity may have developed its Christology when that transformation had not yet been fully implemented. Hence for Jews, incarnation becomes a textual and linguistic phenomenon and not the fleshy one of Christianity. But, as Wolfson states in response to Idel, it is precisely by using that terminology that we can see the ideational and phenomenological parity that flows beneath the differences in appropriation. It may be, as Schäfer has suggested, that the rabbinic canonization of its text-centered religiosity is, in

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part, a rejection of Christology or, perhaps as Boyarin prefers, that these two approaches existed side by side in the Jewish intellectual orbit for centuries before the Babylonian sages put incarnation to rest. Either way, to avoid the term “incarnation” blinds us to the ways in which the substructure of this idea is part of the very fabric of biblical and subsequently Judaic and Christian depictions of God. Wolfson gestures in the direction of medieval kabbalists as well when he writes, [T]he very same kabbalists [who denigrate Christianity] were duly impressed with and intrigued by aspects of this faith . . . and attempted to appropriate them as the authentic esoteric tradition. . . . In my judgment, the kabbalists hidden behind the personae of the zoharic fraternity sought to divest Christological symbols of their Catholic garb and redress them as the mystical truths of Judaism. The zoharic understanding of the text as body, which provides the mechanism by which the body is understood as text, is a stunning illustration of this strategy. . . . The secret of poetic incarnation imparted by matters of Jewish esoteric lore, beholding the luminous flesh from the word, may be seen as a countermyth to the image of the word/light made flesh in the Johannine prologue, a mythologumenon that played an inestimable role in fashioning the hermeneutical aesthetics of medieval Christendom.144

This assessment of possible strategies of medieval kabbalists, especially in Spain, did not operate apologetically (that is, to show where Judaism is better) but rather exercised a deep utilization of the building blocks evident in the Hebrew Bible as imagined through the kabbalistic imagination. The kabbalists sought to present an incarnational metaphysis as a corrective to high Christology that could only exist by drawing from the very fundamentals upon which high Christology was built. Scholars such as Wolfson who are deeply engaged in religious literary traditions and not bound by communal expectations and societal needs to advocate for their own subject have opened up the questions of influence, confluence, and an exploration into the very ways in which differences, when explored honestly and with academic freedom, often reveal surprising modes of sameness and commonality. If one accepts Wolfson’s basic notion that incarnation is very much an operative term in describing certain aspects of classical and mystical Judaism (and thus common nomenclature is appropriate), how is our work affected and how does it contribute to contemporary Judaism?

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V Hans-Joachim Schoeps and Leo Baeck, each in his own way, set up categorical distinctions between Judaism and Christianity as a prelude to their views on how this relationship should be dealt with in Jewish philosophy and theology. While modern Jewish reflections on Christianity are multivalent and cannot be limited to the binaries of period (prewar/postwar) or inclination (apologetic/ post-apologetic) in this chapter I have argued that the four specialists discussed represent two specific articulations of this phenomenon. Schoeps focused on the facticity of revelation and its specific formulation (Sinai/Golgotha) as both the categorical distinction between Judaism and Christianity as well as the way in which the two are connected. Baeck’s case, at least in his prewar work, was a critical response to Harnack’s category of “essence,” even as he accepted “essence” as a legitimate category, and built an apologetic case for Judaism on Christian terms, arguing that Christianity, as a romantic religion, undermines the very goals it sets to achieve in modernity. Michael Wyschogrod and Elliot Wolfson undermine these approaches, again in different ways, by exploring new paths of thinking about difference and sameness in regards to Judaism and Christianity. Both reject the categorical distinctions proffered by Schopes and Baeck, while each fully acknowledges the differences that remain in terms of theological articulation. We have attempted to situate Wyschogrod and Wolfson in the larger reassessment of Judaism and Christianity begun by scholars of Jewish late antiquity.145 Hasidism Incarnate is one more part of the systemic attempt to rethink the categories of Judaism and Christianity in the contemporary academy. Because Hasidism largely developed in Jewish modernity but was not bound by the Christian gaze that hovered over so much of modern Jewish thought, it provides an important example in which Christian ideas that were at once rejected and surreptitiously adopted by medieval Kabbalah, took on an overt and audacious form in Hasidic literature. The focus on the divine/human nexus in the form of the zaddik led Hasidic masters to utilize kabbalistic tropes in creative ways to cultivate a modern Jewish alternative to the Maimonidean matrix that dominated Jewish theology in Western Europe.



POSTSCRIPT

The great political philosopher and scholar of medieval Judaism Leo Strauss wrote the following: “There is no reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity; Judaism is the anti-Christian principle pure and simple.” 1 This about summed up the prewar Jewish attitude toward Christianity, and, even given the significantly changed cultural, political, and theological environment, its resonance continues to this day. In his 2006 book Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism, Menachem Marc Kellner laments that “Maimonides’ reform as described in this book has failed to take hold.”2 He explains that at least in contemporary Jewish Orthodox thought, the near universal acceptance of the antiquity of the Zohar, the classic work of Kabbalah, with its emphasis on myth and what Kellner calls the “­enchanted world” (a clear reference to Max Weber) undermined the Maimonidean rational critique of myth as the center of Jewish spirituality. The sweeping modern historical Jewish program to eradicate myth from Judaism was led in part by the Israeli Bible scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann (1889– 1963). Had Kaufmann been more persuasive in his argument that the real innovative dimension of the Hebrew Bible was its rejection of myth as the core of its theology, all subsequent mythic depictions of Judaism (Kabbalah, Hasidism) could be considered non-normative, even heretical.3 Kaufmann’s philosophical companion and erstwhile teacher was the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, whose Religion of Reason from the Source of Judaism sought to do for Judaism what Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone had attempted

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for Christianity. Kellner’s book all but acknowledges the defeat of that historical and theological project. More recently, Kenneth Seeskin noted, “The reason for Maimonides’ unpopularity is that the sobering nature of his thought made it difficult for most Jews to accept.”4 His explanation points primarily at human weakness and an inability, given the present circumstances, to face an unenchanted world that demands human responsibility. It is a common rationalist critique of Romanticism. The failure of Maimonidean reform is the cause of everything from the messianic Zionism of the Israeli settler movement to the New Age spiritualism of Neo-Hasidism and Jewish Renewal. With its focus on the charismatic leader (zaddikism) and experiential communion (devekut) with God through prayer and ritual, the Hasidic “revolution” ostensibly put to rest any chance for a return to Maimonidean rationalism. In this book I have argued that Hasidism’s impact reached beyond the erasure of the Maimonidean reform; also when interpreted creatively it presented an incarnational way of thinking about Judaism that brought it closer to Christianity, undermining Strauss’s proclamation. The importance of Hasidism for modern Judaism is not a new discovery. Jacob Taubes, in an essay on Martin Buber, notes that Moses Hess (1821–1875), a traditional “enlightened Jew” whose book Rome and Jerusalem inspired Zion­ism, recognized quite early on that Hasidism would play a major role in the modern Jewish imagination.5 Hess knew that the historical battle against ­Hasidism in its early phase could not hold back the romantic spirit it generated in its claim that God is not beyond human experience and that God and the world are not categorically distinct. This book attempted to lay out Hasidism as a foundation for Jewish incarnational thinking that was founded in part on its mythic spirituality and rejection of the experiential divide separating the human from the divine (the Maimonidean matrix). Our exploration focuses on work by scholars of late antiquity who over the past three decades have been systematically showing the theological affinities of Judaism and early Christianity before the purported parting of the ways. Many of the doctrines commonly thought to separate Judaism from Christianity are seen as “an intra-Jewish controversy long before Jesus.”6 The work on medieval Kabbalah by Elliot Wolfson, Yehuda Liebes, and Moshe Idel has shown the ways incarnational themes, whether called by that name or not, permeate the kabbalistic corpus even after the two traditions each achieved doctrinal stability. When these themes were adopted and intensified in the

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­ asidic notion of zaddikism, and when Hasidism encountered the New Age in H postwar America and Israel, the Maimonidean reform simply did not stand a chance. The winds of the East (Buddhism, for example) that reached Western shores, coupled with the Romanticism of the Aquarian Age, breathed new life into ­Hasidic Romantic spirituality (whether rightly or wrongly interpreted is another matter) making it the template of much of lived Judaism in the contemporary world in both Orthodox and non-Orthodox circles. On this Arthur Green wrote in the 1980s, “In recent decades only have the historical researches of Israeli scholars begun to render the Hasidic material accessible, and the influence of mysticism, especially of contemplative Buddhism and Hindu origin, on the intellectual life of the West, has created an atmosphere in which such non-personalist terminology is of increased interest.”7 This move to the personalist, mythic, romantic, or what Jewish philosopher Steven Schwarzschild called “the lure of immanence,” deserves some attention. I briefly engage Schwarzschild here by way of conclusion because he is a Jewish philosopher who remained deeply embedded in the European (neoKantian) philosophical tradition of his youth while translating those ways to his position in postwar America. His 1966 essay, “The Lure of Immanence— The Crisis in Contemporary Religious Thought,” may be the last great attempt to save (liberal) Judaism from the claws of what half a decade later would become the concretization of the New Age, in which Hasidism played a significant role among young Jews.8 For Schwarzschild, the crisis exists between two poles he calls “the theology of blasphemy” (“death of God” theology that originated with Hegel) and “the social-secular Gospel” initiated perhaps by Marxist readings of religion but exemplified in Paul Van Buren’s The Secular Meaning of the Gospel and ­Harvey Cox’s Secular City. Schwarzschild argues that contemporary Judaism must respond to these two poles: on the one hand, the “lure of immanence” of an incarnational theology, where transcendence as categorical “other” has been usurped and transcendence has become effaced in the immanence of the world or history; on the other hand, the secularization of Christianity that views every­ thing in the vertical plane of ethics without transcendence. For S­ chwarzschild, the erasure of transcendence as the categorical “other” (the secular-social gospel) undermines the possibility of ethics, but he argues also that the collapse of transcendence into immanence (Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, and one could add some new interpretations of Hasidism) undermines the Jewish rejection of incarnationalism.

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Schwarzschild thus offers Judaism as a religion that accepts immanence only as divine will and not physicality/corporeality, and views all Jewish ethics as founded in the law (halakha) that must be rooted in a transcendent commanding God, a God that may be absent but not dead. The merits or deficiencies of Schwarzschild’s solution are not important here. What is relevant is that the burning issue in 1966 for Schwarzschild was still the lure of immanence in terms of secularism and the collapse of transcendence into immanence, which not only gives us the (secular) incarnationalism of Hegel but also Heidegger’s philosophy in which ethics seems to disappear in the cloud of Dasein.9 The emergence of Hasidism as a template for Jewish spirituality had not yet taken root when Schwarzschild wrote his essay. Today things look somewhat different. The strong thrust of secularism, while still vital, has been complicated by Tal Asad and his students who challenge the binaries of religion and the secular, viewing them in a dialectical and mutually dependent relationship. Peter Berger claims we are undergoing what he calls a process of “desecularization” with the emergence of religious maximalists and fundamentalists who have changed the conversation about everything from traditional religion to geopolitics. With the collapse the Soviet Union, the great secular challenge of communism has waned while the theocratic impulses in the Muslim world, America, and Israel are on the rise. More relevant to the concerns of this book is that the adaptation of Hasidism, with its lure of immanence as a paradigm of Jewish authenticity that has offered scholars a new perspective on how Hasidism’s agenda, presents a Judaism that subverts the categorical difference between Judaism and Christianity. At the heart of Hasidism Incarnate is the thesis that Hasidism is the “crazy aunt in the attic” that many modern Jewish philosophers, represented here by Schwarzschild, Kellner, and Seeskin, did not want us to see or at least take too seriously. Hasidism, especially interpreted outside its Orthodox context, is the anti-Maimonidean Judaism par excellence. Jewish thinkers who were members of the first wave of neo-Hasidism, such as Martin Buber, Hillel Zeitlin, I. L. Peretz, Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, Marc Chagall (whose painting “The Yellow Crucifix” adorns the cover of this book), and the young Abraham Joshua H ­ eschel, already knew this and prepared the way for the second wave that would emerge at the end of the twentieth century. They creatively lifted ­Hasidism out of its hypertraditional context and exposed some of its unorthodox implications. But on the question of Christianity, the first-wave figures, perhaps with the exception of Buber and Chagall, were still ensconced in a

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categorical distinction between Judaism and Christianity. This began to erode among Zionists in Palestine, with men who included Joseph Klausner, Pinhas Lapide, and Yosef Brenner, who begin to debate Jesus’s place in the Zionist narrative of Jewish heroes in the Land of Israel.10 But even there, the person of Jesus was more the focus than the doctrines that came to define Christianity. In America beginning in the 1960s, and largely owing to the popularity of the work of Buber, Heschel, and Aryeh Kaplan, as well as Arthur Green and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the Hasidic paradigm took center stage.11 Given the American context, where Jewish conversion to Christianity was not an issue and where Christian persecution was not a threat, new perspectives on the theological proximity of Jewish mysticism and Hasidic spirituality to Christianity became fair game.12 Moreover, as Hasidism continued to be interpreted outside the halakhic framework of Orthodoxy (something that began in first-wave neo-Hasidism in Europe), dimensions of Hasidic spirituality that remained latent in traditional interpretations came to the fore. A critical appraisal of such a phenomenon, not specific to Hasidism, was proffered by Jacob Taubes when he wrote, “The moment Halachah ceases to be the determining force in Jewish life, the door is opened to all the disguised anti-Halachic (antinomian) and Christian assumptions current in modern secularized Christian society. Judaism ceases to be a matter of principle and remains only one of tradition. Religious revivals that do not reckon with Halachah as the vital essence of Judaism degenerate into so much romantic nostalgia and only hasten the end of Judaism.”13 Taubes, trained in Europe and the author of an important book on Paul and Judaism, certainly reflects a notion not dissimilar from Schwarzschild cited above. His claim that the marginalization of halakha will result in the end of Judaism cannot bear the weight of the past three decades of Judaism and Jewish scholarship, at least in America. While this may be more obvious to those who write popular works about Judaism, it is also relevant to those devoted to scholarship. One must not overestimate the contextual influence on scholars such as Wolfson and Michael Fishbane, for example, who are responsible for reviving the category of myth in Judaism and opening up the classical tradition to themes that many of their predecessors sought to batten down.14 Both have done their scholarly work in postwar America when Hasidism and Jewish mysticism achieved prominence. Both have deep knowledge and respect for the tradition, normative and nonnormative, and articulate their scholarly work in the context of a Jewish and

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general society where lines defining what can and cannot be said, what should and should not be said, are being redrawn. Hasidism Incarnate is part of this scholarly trajectory. It rereads Hasidism as a dimension of Jewish modernity not bound by the Christian gaze, resulting in an open and provocative exploration of divine embodiment that crosses over to the incarnational. This reading, my reading, is also a product of my living in a world very different from that of the analyzed texts. In any case, the ways have surely parted, making any true reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity impossible and——just as important—­ unnecessary. But what is truly at issue in this book is the claim that if we remove the defensive and polemical lenses that color past literature on modern Jewish thought, we may find that Hasidism, an alternative vision of Jewish modernity emerging from the belly of the Jewish tradition outside the Christian gaze, looks much less different than our previous, theologically grounded under­standing of Christianity would suggest.

R E F E R E NCE M AT T E R

NOTES

For scriptural translations (unless otherwise indicated) I use TANAKH, the Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible. If I alter the translations, I note it in the endnotes.

Introduction

1.  While Gershom Scholem engaged in comparative analysis and highlighted external influences on kabbalistic literature, many other scholars such as Yehuda Liebes, Elliot Wolfson, and Moshe Idel have gone much farther in attempting to dilate the lens through which we view kabbalistic literature. Essays such as Liebes’s “Christian Influences on the Zohar,” Wolfson’s Through a Speculum That Shines and more recently Language, Eros, Being, and Idel’s Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism blazed new trails of scholarship on Jewish mysticism viewed in comparative perspective. There is much disagreement about the practice of comparative analysis and the extent to which terms foreign to the texts at hand should be used to explain them. The general tendency of contemporary scholarship on Jewish mysticism is to view it as a complex and often messy body of texts with boundaries more permeable than previously thought. See Tourov, “Hasidism and Christianity of the Eastern Territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth” and, for a recent review of the literature and discussion of method, Idel, Ben, 1–73 and 625–35. 2.  On comparison more generally, see Smith, Drudgery Divine, esp. 36–53, and Smith, “In Comparison a Magic Dwells,” 19–35. 3.  A similar notion can be found in Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, 112: “A positive contact with a person in another tradition reopens relationship to his or her whole tradition, potentially.” While Greenberg is speaking specifically about dialogue, I refer to the exchange of terminology as a constructive and critical tool as potentially shedding new light on one’s own traditional constructions. Idel in Ben (see note 1) is very skeptical of the use of foreign terminology and concepts to explicate kabbalistic literature. He often prefers neologisms (when terms are not forthcoming from the literature itself) that do not carry the ideological weight of another tradition or set of ideas. While the general caution Idel expresses is well-placed, part of the vocation of scholarship is to engage in this kind of terminological transference, and to refrain completely would inhibit the ability to tease out from these texts what

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may be some underlying implications that the authors themselves may not have been attuned to. 4.  In different ways the many works of Jacob Neusner and Daniel Boyarin have shaped the academic discussion on late antique Judaism in this way. 5.  This comes close but is not identical to the cross-cultural method espoused by Wendy Doniger and Laurie Patton. See the introduction to their Myth and Method. The cross-cultural method assumes that exploring the intersection of different cultures/­ religions as opposed to their generalizations is a better way to explore difference. 6.  See Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 93–128. 7.  Idel notes that one must consider the extent to which Christian theological ideas are derived from ancient Israelite sources and how some “Christian” readings may have emerged again in medieval Kabbalah already Judaized through centuries of rabbinic learning. See Idel, Ben, 633, and on Judaism and incarnation in rabbinic thought, see Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation.” 8.  See the sources in Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages, and Berger, Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue: Essays in Jewish Christian Relations. 9.  On this see Goodman, God of Abraham. 10.  See Idel, “Maimonides and Kabbalah,” and Wolfson, “Beneath the Wings of the Great Eagle,” 209–37. 11.  See Goshen-Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” and Goshen-Gottstein, “Judaisms and Incarnational Theologies.” See also Boyarin, Border Lines, 112–27, and Neusner, The Incarnation of God, 82–100 and 165–98. The notion of God as Torah in the Italian kabbalist Menahem Recanati is mentioned in Scholem, “The Meaning of Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” 32–86. 12.  For example, see Goshen-Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” and Goshen-Gottstein, “Judaisms and Incarnational Theologies.” 13.  The conventional wisdom that Judaism unequivocally rejects incarnation is quite common in the modern Jewish imagination. For one example see Ozick, “Judaism and Harold Bloom,” 53: “[For Jews] there is no competition with the text, no power struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator. The aim, instead, is to reproduce a purely transmitted inheritance, free of substitution or incarnation.” This is a deeply misinformed claim and one that ignores almost completely the Jewish mystical tradition or, perhaps, reflects an apologetic rendering of that tradition common among contemporary American Jews, progressives and traditionalists alike. 14.  On this, see Boyarin, Border Lines, 112–47, and Magid, From Metaphysics to ­Midrash, 196–206. 15. Boyarin, Border Lines, 128–47. 16.  Michael Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 124. It is surely the case that already in talmudic literature the sages rejected the notion of incarnation of any form, citing such verses as Ezekiel 28:2, “Thus said the Lord God, because you have been so haughty and have said, ‘I am a god; I sit enthroned like a god in the heart of the seas,’ whereas you are not a god but a man, though you deemed your mind equal to a god’s. . . .” See, for ex-

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ample, Jerusalem Talmud Ta’anit 2:1/24 fol. 65b, “If a man tells you I am God, he is a liar; I am the son of man, he will regret it; I go up to the heavens, he has said, but he shall not do it.” This Midrash is an interpretation of Numbers 23:18–24. Many suggest this may refer to Hiram of Tyre, the subject of the Ezekiel passage mentioned above, but Peter Schäfer has recently suggested that it may (also) be a refutation of Christian doctrine. See Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 108–10. 17.  For an important collection of essays that grapple with the “parting of the ways” of Judaism and Christianity, see Becker and Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted. 18.  See Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 190–260, and Wolfson, “Inscribed in the Book of the Living.” 19.  On the similarities between kabbalistic notions of the shekhina and Maryology, see Green, “Shekhina, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs”; Abrams, “The Virgin Mary as the Moon that Lacks the Sun”; and Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty. 20.  For another view, see Idel, Ben, 61. Idel generally prefers to take the texts he reads at their word, that is, to avoid interpolation by staying close to the claims the texts make about their subject. While this is certainly important, scholarship is also vested with the job of reading texts against themselves, what Scholem called “reading texts against their declared intentions.” This is not necessarily a misreading (perhaps closer to a “misprision,” in Harold Bloom’s felicitous terminology) but rather the product of a reader who has a wider context in which to view the texts. 21. Idel, Ben, 531ff. 22.  Recent work by historians of Eastern Europe has suggested there was more interaction between ultra-traditional Jewish communities and their Christian neighbors than previously thought. See, for example, Dynner, “Hasidism and Habitat”; Zhuk, “In Search of the Millennium”; and Maciejko, “The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith.” 23.  I borrow this notion of the “gaze” (but use it somewhat differently) from Susannah Heschel’s study of Abraham Geiger and his writings on Jesus. See Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 1–22. On Judaism and the Enlightenment, see Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment. 24.  In the conclusion to his essay on the debate between Buber and Scholem on Hasidism, Idel notes, “Also awaiting exploration are the possible affinities between ­Hasidism and Christian thought.” See Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors, 216. The present book is an exploration of this very topic. 25.  Missionary Journal and Memoir of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, Missionary to the Jews, 2:350, 351. I want to thank Eliyahu Stern for pointing me to this reference. The commonalities between Hasidism and Christianity were noticed by Jewish scholars as well. For example, comparing Simon Dubnow’s The History of Hasidism (Buenos Aires, 1958; in Yiddish) and Ernst Renan’s The History of the Origins of Christianity (London, 1888– 1889), Robert M. Seltzer notes, “The similarities between Dubnow’s and Renan’s work result in part from the common social pattern in both movements; there are further parallels between Christian and Hasidic piety.” Seltzer, Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism,” 110, note 12. 26. Idel, Ben, 57.

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27.  On Idel’s take on Hasidism in this regard, see Ben, 531–84. 28. Idel, Ben, 4, 5, 59. 29. Idel, Ben, 45. 30. Idel, Ben, 59. 31. Idel, Ben, 59 32. Idel, Ben, 60. 33. Smith, To Take Place, 14. See also Smith, Drudgery Divine, 47, 48. 34. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 256. 35. Smith, Drudgery Divine, 52. 36.  See Wolfson, “Textual Flesh, Incarnation, and the Imaginal Body,” 190–91. 37. Smith, Drudgery Divine, 52. 38.  On this, see Magid, “Hasidism: Mystical and Non-Mystical Interpretations of Scripture.” 39.  See Liebes, “Christian Influences on the Zohar”; Wolfson, “Anthropomorphic Imagery and Letter Symbolism in the Zohar”; Wolfson, “Iconicity of the Text”; and Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 242–60. 40. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 26. 41.  See Nouss, “Translation as Métissage,” 246. 42. Butler, Parting Ways, 1–27. 43.  See Idel, Ben, 61. He implies a categorical distinction between “Jewish-Christian dialogue,” where the term “incarnation” may have significance, and scholarship, where it does not. I suggest that while the scholar is not involved prima facie with the socio­ political project of “Jewish-Christian dialogue,” she is by definition involved in the process of translation as a cultural product, one that has an impact not only on the tradition she works in but on the nomenclature she imports to understand her subject. 44. Idel, Ben, 13–14. 45.  See, for example, Ross, A Beloved-Despised Tradition, and Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, esp. 13–60 and 206–51. 46.  Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 6, note 12. 47.  See Ross, A Beloved-Despised Tradition, 60–134. 48.  See, for example, Kyle, The New Age Movement in American Culture; Heelas, The New Age Movement; Wuthnow, After Heaven; Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door; and Schmidt, Restless Souls. 49.  See, for example, Huss, “The New Age of Kabbalah,” and the essays in Huss, ed., Kabbalah and Contemporary Spiritual Revival. 50.  A more sustained account of this line of argument can be found in Magid, American Post-Judaism. 51.  See, for example, Garb, The Chosen Will Become Herds, 11–20. 52. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 9. 53.  Cited in Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 11. 54.  I want to thank Elliot Wolfson for his remarks in personal communications. His views greatly helped formulate these paragraphs. 55. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 325–50.

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Chapter 1

1.  See Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 88–139; Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar, 1–85; and Green, “The Zaddik as Axis Mundi.” See also Elior, The Mystical Origins of Hasidism, 126–51; Idel, Hasidism, 189–208; and Etkes, “The Zaddik.” On sainthood in Judaism, see Robert L. Cohen, “Sainthood on the Periphery.” 2.  On the zaddik in Hasidism, see Shatz-Uffenheimer, “The Essence of the Z ­ addik in Hasidism”; Piekarz, The Beginnings of Hasidism, 280–302; Green, “Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq”; Ada Rapaport-Albert, “God and the Zaddik as the Two Focal Points of Hasidic Worship”; and Etkes, “The Zaddik.” Idel’s Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism, 531–84, deals with this this idea from the perspective of “sonship.” His topic overlaps somewhat with mine, but his focus is less on the notion of incarnational thinking and more on how the zaddik is depicted as a “son of God” and the implications of that. 3.  On the notion of “magic” and the zaddik that reflects my argument see Weiss, “The Saddik.” 4.  See Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism, 286–96 and Nathaniel Berman, “Aestheticism, Rationalism, and Esotericism.” 5. Seeskin, Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age, 5. See also Schwarzschild, “The Lure of Immanence.” 6.  One important exception might be Franz Rosenzweig, whose notion of monotheism included a paradox of nearness and distance that countered the modern Maimonidean matrix. See his translation and comments on Yehuda Ha-Levi’s poetry in Galli, ed., Franz Rosenzweig and Juhuda Halevi, 204–5, and the discussion in Wolfson, “Configuration of Untruth in the Mirror of God’s Truth.” The embodied inclination toward kabbalistic thinking may have also contributed to the introduction of feminist revisions of Jewish philosophy in the late twentieth century, for example, Tirosh-­ Rothschild, “‘Dare to Know.’” 7.  One quite startling example can be found in Joseph of Hamadan’s Sefer Tashak in Zwelling, ed., Sefer Tashak, 13: “Hence The Holy One said to Moses, our master, ‘Tell the Israelite people to bring me gifts (Exod. 25:2), they should make a body and soul for [their] God and I will take bodily form [etgashem] in it.’” See also Nahmanides commentary to Exod. 16:6 and Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, 64 and note 51. 8.  One could argue—correctly I believe—that this experiment had precedent in earlier Kabbalah, especially that of the Zohar and, to a lesser extent, Abraham Abulafia. See Liebes, “Shimon bar Yohai”; Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation”; Wolfson, “Iconic Visualization and the Imaginal Body of God”; and Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 190– 260. In “The Saddik,” 189, Joseph Weiss wrote: “Any mystical doctrine declaring the oneness of God and the word, or of God and man, or of all three, may constitute the essential basis for a magical theory that envisages the possibility of man’s producing changes either in the world or in the sphere of Divinity. . . . To be more precise, the theoretical basis is not of the Saddik’s oneness with God but a slightly more acceptable notion; the correspondence or parallelism between God and the Saddik.” While I am in full agreement with Weiss here, I would add that at times Hasidic teaching comes even closer to

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erasing the barrier between separation and unity with God than would be imagined if it were read outside an Orthodox and apologetic interpretation. 9. Buber, The Prophetic Faith, 234. For more scholarly analogies that focus specifically on Chabad Hasidism, see Marcus, “The Once and Future Messiah in Early Christianity and Chabad.” 10.  For a deeper discussion of this transition, see Magid, From Metaphysis to ­Midrash, 198–200. 11.  John’s locution seems to be an intentional inversion of Isaiah 40:6–8: “All flesh is like grass . . . grass withers but the word of God will stand forever.” 12.  See, for example, the comment about John 1:14 in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 159; 13.  See especially Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 190–260. 14.  On the doctrine of the zaddik as the only real innovation of Hasidism, see ­Piekarz, Be-Yemei Zemikhat ha-Hasidut, 28–304, and Piekarz, Hasidut Polin, 157–80. See also Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 344–50; Elior, The Mysticism Origins of Hasidism, 126–51, and Idel, Hasidism, 189–208. 15.  See Scholem, “The Beginnings of Christian Kabbalah”; Scholem, “The Historical Figure of the Baal Shem Tov,” 294; Liebes, “Christian Influences on the Zohar”; Wolfson, “Language, Secrecy, and the Mysteries of Law”; Tourov, “Hasidism and Christianity of the Eastern Territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth”; Idel, Ben, 567–70; and Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah. 16.  The use of Maimonides in classical Kabbalah is also an important part of this story. See Idel, “Maimonides and Kabbalah,” and Wolfson, “Beneath the Wings of the Great Eagle.” On Maimonides and Hasidism see Dienstag, “Ha-Moreh Nevuhim ve Sefer ha-Maddah be Sifrut ha-Hasidut”; Horodetzky, “The Rambam in Kabbalah and Hasidism”; and Magid, Hasidism on the Margin, 229–48. 17.  Also called Mezeritch; now Mezhirichi in Rivne Oblast, Ukraine. 18.  Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer (d. 1760). 19.  On Koppel, see Magid, “The Metaphysics of Malkhut,” and chapter 4 in this volume. 20.  The only scholarly treatment of Koppel that I have seen is Tishby, “Between Sabbateanism and Hasidism,” which focuses almost exclusively on the similarities between Koppel’s kabbalism and that of Nathan of Gaza. 21. Koppel, Sha’arei Gan Eden, 44b. This idea resonates with some Sufi depictions of the “Perfect Human Being,” particularly that of the thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Mihyi ad-Din ibn al-Arabi. Ibn Arabi argues the perfect human being is an expression of the divine logos as manifest in the world. Although he does not quite cross the incarnational line (he says that the perfect human being is not divine but as close to it as anything can be) he comes quite close to the notion that the human can exceed his/her humanity. See Takeshita, Ibn ‘Arabīs Theory of the Perfect Man and Its Place in the History of Thought, and Cornell, The Realm of the Saint, 205, 206, and 208. 22.  Rabbi Elimelech Weisblum of Lizhensk (1717–1787). 23.  Elimelech of Lizhensk, Noam Elimelech, 45b. See also Idel, Ben, 242. Idel idem. cites the page as 12c, obviously from a different edition.

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24.  In Habad, with its distinctive acomsic metaphysics, this idea is even more pungent. See Wolfson, Open Secret, 7–8, 59, 129; and Idel, Ben, 564–66. 25.  He was the son of Adel, the Baal Shem Tov’s daughter, and brother of Barukh of Medzhibozh. In general see Rock, “Rabbi Moses Ephraim of Sudilkov’s Degel Mahaneh Ephraim.” 26.  On the early formation of these courts, see Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidism after 1772.” 27.  The most comprehensive study to date is Brill, “The Spiritual World of a Master of Awe,” 27–65. 28.  See Ephraim, Degel Mahane Ephraim, 32b, where he teaches that the life force of God is present in the natural world. I would suggest, however, that the dimension of divine life in Israel, noted here as “essence,” is of a different nature than the divine life force in the natural world. 29.  See also Shneur Zalman of Liady, Sefer ha-Tanya, 2:6. 30.  A more common translation of this verse would be “This is the teaching about a person [who dies in a tent].” See Alter, The Five Books of Moses. The JPS Tanakh translates it more colloquially: “This the ritual. When a person dies in a tent.” 31.  Degel, 1. On rabbinic notions of the Torah as God incarnate, see Neusner, The Incarnation of God, esp. 82–100 and 150–98. On logos theology, see Boyarin, Border Lines, 112–27. See also Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,” 239–53. 32.  In classical Kabbalah the notion of “ben Adam” or in the Zohar “bar nash,” while translated literally as “human,” is more accurately referring to the Jew, and particularly the male Jew. See, for example, Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 75 and note 239: “Needless to say, the Zohar (and all other kabbalistic texts influenced by their terminology) will yield a radically different logical conception when it is understood that in the vast majority of cases terms such as bar nash and benei nasha denote not humanity in general, but the Jewish people in particularly.” 33.  Moshe Hayyim often obliquely claims that divinity does in fact dwell in the body of the zaddik. See Brill, “The Spiritual World,” 28. See also more generally Idel, Hasidism, 246. 34.  I use the pronoun “he” here because in the kabbalistic tradition extending from the Zohar it was only the Jewish male who was created in the divine image. Thus it is the male alone who hold the potential for this theosis. 35. See Degel, 3a and 143a. 36.  On the absorption of the text as a Jewish form of incarnation, see Neusner, The Incarnation of God, 82–102; Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,” 239–54; and Neusner, Language, Eros, Being, 190–260. See also Magid, “Ethics Disentangled from the Law.” 37.  This is reminiscent of the talmudic story that the angel of death wanted to take King David but could not do so as long as he was engaged in Torah. At one point he was distracted from a noise outside the window, and at that moment, death came upon him. See b.T. Shabbat 30a/b. A similar story is told of Rabbah bar Nahmani is b.T. Baba Metzia 86a. 38.  See Brill, “The Spiritual World,” 32–40; and Ephraim, Degel, 102b. This idea is

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rooted in the Zohar. See Zohar Hadash on Ruth, 77d, based on Proverbs 6:23. On faith healing in Eastern Europe, see Petrovsky-Stern, “‘You Will Find it in the Pharmacy.’” 39.  Degel, 1. 40.  See Piekarz, The Beginnings of Hasidism, 20–31, and Greis, “The Hasidic Managing Editor as an Agent of Culture,” 149–50. 41.  This is a common, perhaps fundamental, question in the Toldot. For Jacob Joseph, Hasidism is necessary precisely because it de-contextualizes and de-historicizes the biblical narrative such that it speaks to the needs and desires of the contemporary reader. See Magid, “Hasidism: Mystical and Non-Mystical Interpretations of Scripture.” 42.  This is a complete de-contextualization of the verse in question. Robert Alter translates this verse as, “you should sacrifice it so that it will be acceptable to you.” JPS Tanakh translates it: “sacrifice it so that it will be acceptable on your behalf.” Jacob ­Joseph offers a hyperliteral translation of the verse to illustrate his notion of a person as a combination of matter and form that should be transformed (live by them) into matter. “Life” here seems to imply eternal life or immortality. 43.  The figure of Enoch looms large in any Jewish analysis of the superhuman. See most recently Idel, Ben, 134–39, 645–70. See also Idel, “Enoch: The Mystical Cobbler” and Idel, “Adam and Enoch in St. Ephrem the Syrian.” 44.  The translation does not catch the nuance of the locution ‫והצורה זכו בהזדכך חומרם‬ ‫כי שניהם החומר‬. More literally this would read, “in both of them, matter and form were purified from their [corporeal] matter.” On the notion of the biblical personalities being divorced from physicality, see the Maggid of Mezritch’s comment on Moses in Torat ­Ha-Maggid, 1:107. Explaining why his first son is named Gershon (I was a stranger, ger) he writes, “Moshe had to prove why given his holy statute he had sexual desire like other men given that he was divorced from all desire. Thus he said ‘I was a stranger in a foreign land,” that is, during the sex act I was like a stranger (ger) in the land, in the land, meaning in corporeality.” 45.  Yaakov Cohen, Toldot Yaakov Yosef, 1:59a/b. For a fascinating account of Elijah’s apotheosis that makes a claim similar to this one, see the late-fifteenth-century kabbalistic treatise Sefer ha-Meshiv, cited in Idel, Enchanted Chains, 115. 46.  On mystical death in Judaism, see Michael Fishbane, “The Imagination of Death in Jewish Spirituality,” and Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God. 47.  Even in the case of the apotheosis of Elijah, kabbalists stress his ability to recorporealize temporarily in order to perform miraculous acts or to reveal God’s glory. See Sefer ha-Meshiv, cited in Idel, “Inquiries in the Doctrine of Sefer Ha-Meshiv.” 48.  On this dimension of Jacob Joseph’s Hasidic work, see Magid, “Hasidism.” 49.  Hayyim of Czernovitz, Sidduro shel Shabbat, 81a/b. See Green, Devotion and Commandment, 87, note 103. 50.  See Magid, Hasidism on the Margin, 229–48. 51.  b.T. Haggigah 14b. 52. Cohen, Toldot Yaakov Yosef 1:328. See also Toldot 1:408d; Nahmanides to Leviticus 18:5; and Hidushei MaHaRsha to b.T. Haggigah 4b. 53.  The rabbis teach that those who die with a kiss do not acquire a state of de-

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filement of death (tuma’at meit). See Zohar 1:168a; Nahmanides’ “Commentary on the Torah” to Numbers 19:2. See also Tosefot to b.T. Baba Meziah 114b s.v. “ma’hu.” 54.  See Magid, “Hasidism: Mystical and Non-Mystical Interpretations of Scripture.” 55.  On the significance of peshat as plain-sense or contextual meaning see Loewe, “The ‘Plain’ Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis”; Cohen, “Reflections on the Concept of Peshuto shel Mikra at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century”; and more recently Harris, “Concepts of Scripture in the School of Rashi,” 122. 56.  Maggid of Mezritch, Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov, 196, 197. For another discussion of this text see Margolin, “New Models of the Sacred Leader at the Beginning of Hasidism,” 384. On the Maggid’s notion of the zaddik, see Joseph Weiss, “The Saddik—Altering the Divine Will.” 57.  On this, see Kimmlemen, The Mystical Meaning of Lekhah Dodi and Kabbalat Shabbat, 47, 48. 58.  See Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, ‘Or ha-Meir, 2:14b/15a. 59.  The phrase kishut malei kumato is used numerous times by Wolf in his ‘Or haMeir. I have not found any other Hasidic or kabbalistic source that uses this phrase. In a discussion of Rosh ha-Shana, Wolf uses it to describe the preliminary stages to make one a vessel fit to receive. In Deuteronomy he uses it to describe as the process of becoming pure from gentile impurity. And in his commentary on Genesis he uses it to describe how Jacob had not yet purified himself to sever his relationship with Laban. 60.  In this text at least, Avraham Zaken seems to be used interchangeably with Avraham Saba. 61. Zohar 2:110a and 2:189b. 62.  See Magid, “Brother Where Art Thou?” 209–40, and chapter 7 below. 63.  Shem me-Shmuel, 4:297a. This is all based on a discussion in the MaHaRal of Prague’s Gevurot ha-Shem, chapter 28 from the reprint of the Jerusalem edition by Eastern Book Press, Inc. Monsey, NY, no date. 64.  Gevurot ha-Shem, 297b. 65.  Gevurot ha-Shem, 297b. See also Shem me-Shmuel 4:248, where, in opposition to Korah, Moses is described as someone whose body becomes completely soul (‫)נפש כולו נעשה הגוף‬. 66.  It would also fit well with the rabbis’ claim of Moses not dying, although R. Shmuel does not mention this. See b.T. Sota 13b. 67.  Gevurot ha-Shem, 298a. See also Pesikta Rabati, 14. 68.  For example, see Guroian, Incarnate Love, 20: “The Incarnation was a perfect act of love in its descending and ascending movements. First, while preserving the integrity of the human nature and its distinction from the divine, God in Christ restored by grace the human capacity to reciprocate God’s love. Second, Christ in his humanity completed the human movement toward a full communion with the Godhead.” 69.  In fact, Joshua George Lazarus (1799–1869), a Jewish convert to Christianity who had a sympathetic attitude toward Lubavitch Hasidism—even secretly traveling there to observe their customs—notes the close affinity between Hasidism and Christianity. See Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim, 60.

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Chapter 2

1.  “Charisma” comes from the Greek charizesthai, “gift of divine origin.” 2. Badiou, Saint Paul, 78. For a critique of Badiou’s approach, see Nirenberg, AntiJudaism, 48–86. 3. Badiou, 77. 4.  In “The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism” Jon Levenson grounds the universal in the Torah/law itself. 5. Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 196–201, and the Introduction to the current book. On the revolutionary nature of the Deuteronomic school, see Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation. David Hartman in Israelis and the Jewish Tradition, 104, presents a similar motif in a slightly different way. He suggests that there was “a shift in the tradition from an event-based to a text-centered theology.” He writes this is response to his call to marginalize the messianic idea in Judaism. Still, the “textbased theology” he advocates has not tempered overt messianism among many Jews. 6.  See, for example, Miller, “‘Moses My Servant.’” 7.  For example Hezekiah ben Menoah (Hizkuni), who explained, “‘we do not know his burial place until this day,’ so that we will not use it to ask for divine intervention— (shoalei maytim).” It was therefore significant that the burial place of Nahman of Bratslav in Uman, Ukraine, became of central importance in Bratslav spirituality, a tenet he cultivated himself. See Magid, “Uman, Uman, Rosh ha-Shana: R. Nahman’s Grave as Erez Yisrael” at http://seforim.blogspot.com/2010/10/shaul-magid-uman-uman-rosh-ha -shana-r.html. 8.  The tension between the text and person is part of Rabbinic Judaism as well. See, for example, b.T. Makkot 22b, “How stupid are the people of Babylonia which stand before a Torah scroll but not before a great sage.” Of course, for the rabbis the greatness of the sage was his ability to interpret the text. Thus this depiction is really one of fortifying rabbinic authority. In Nahman, however, the charisma of the zaddik was not about his power of interpretation but the power of his personality and spiritual origin. This, too, was certainly not new in Hasidism. Kabbalah often developed theories of charisma that placed the mystic in close proximity to the text regarding authority. One example is the description of Shimon bar Yohai in the Zohar. See Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar” and Fishbane, “The Scent of the Rose,” 334: “Shimon bar Yohai is no ordinary human being; indeed he is more comparable to divinity than humanity.” Zaddikism did not introduce something new as much as focus on a subversive dimension endemic to Judaism throughout its history. 9.  Nahman of Bratslav. Likutei Moharan. Bilingual edition. Translated by M. Mykoff. Edited by M. Mykoff and O. Bergman (Jerusalem and New York: Breslov Research Institute, 1990); hereinafter cited as LM. 10. Weber, Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building (hereinafter cited as On Charisma), 52; and Weber, Economy and Society, 241–42. 11.  See Weiss, “R. Nahman and the Controversy Around Him,” and Green, Tormented Master, 94–134. Aside from Menahem Mendel Schneerson of Lubavitch (d. 1994), the only normative Jewish figure as audacious in claiming of such divine status

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was Abraham Abulafia. See Idel, Messianic Mystics, 73 and 74, and Idel, Ben, 305–13. On Schneerson see Wolfson, Open Secret, esp. 66–129. 12.  Most works about Nahman (e.g. Hayye Moharan, Shivhei ha-Ran; and Sihot haRan) focus on the charismatic nature of his personality more than the miracle stories found in other hagiographical literature. Green, Tormented Master; Mark, Mystics and Madmen in the Works of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav; and Megillat Setarim: The Esoteric Messianic Vision of R. Nahman of Bratslav are three noteworthy studies, although none focuses specifically on charisma as it applies to their subject. 13.  For example Weber, From Max Weber, 245–66; Weber, On Charisma, xxxii– xxxv. See also Wexler, “Social Psychology, the Hasidic Ethics, and the Spirit of the New Age,” and more generally Wexler, Mystical Society. A growing number of studies apply the Weberian category of charisma to the Hasidic zaddik. This excludes the work of Martin Buber, which is in many ways premised on Weber’s categories although Buber does not often address them specifically. Studies include Breslauer, “Charisma and Leadership”; Elior, The Mystical Origin of Hasidism, 130–34; and the brief discussion by Idel in Ben, 531–34. See also Green, “Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq”; Rapaport-­Albert, “God and the Zaddik as the Two Focal Points of Hasidic Worship”; and Etkes, “The Zaddik.” For some sociological studies, see Sharot, “Hasidism and the Routinization of Charisma”; and Bosk, “The Routinization of Charisma.” On charisma and Jewish leadership more generally, see Idel, “Leadership and Charisma”; Pinhas Giller, “Leadership and Charisma among Mizrahi Modern Kabbalists in the Footsteps of Shar’abi-­Contemporary Kabbalah”; and Morris Faierstein, “Charisma and Anti-Charisma in Safed.” 14.  See for example Neusner, The Incarnation of God; Boyarin, Border Lines; Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation”; and Wolfson, “The Body in the Text.” The most recent work is Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 190–260; Wolfson, “Inscribed in the Book of the Living”; and Wolfson, Open Secret, 66–129. 15.  In fact the ostensible incoherence of incarnation was often used in Jewish medieval polemics against Christianity. See also Goshen-Gottstein, “Judaisms and Incarnational Theologies,” but also Idel, Ben, 58–62, 451. 16.  Idel opposes the use of the term “incarnation” as it applies to Judaism (see Ben, 9–62) but also acknowledges the extent to which Christian ideas may be rooted in Jewish theologoumena, some of which emerge in different form in Kabbalah. See Idel, Ben, 635, and my discussion of Idel in the Introduction to this study. 17. Sandmel, We Jews and Jesus, 42. 18.  “Mutation” is used in the positive biological sense as by Larry Hurtado in One God, One Lord, 99–104. 19. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 5. 20.  See Green, Tormented Master, esp. 135–81. 21.  On Nahman’s own messianic strivings, see Green, Tormented Master, 182–222, and Liebes, “Ha-Tikkun Ha-Kelali of R. Nahman of Bratslav and its Sabbatean Links,” 115–50. On the hermeneutical theory in Likutei Moharan, see Magid, “Associative Midrash.” See Weber, On Charisma, 56, on the notion of inheritance regarding charisma.

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22.  The following citation from Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 26, is useful: “Suffice it here to note that the task of responsible scholarship is to acknowledge the reverberations of these ideas in contemporary compositions, which undoubtedly have an influence on the current socio-political scene, even though we want to avoid ethical condemnation of a tradition shaped in a different time. In short we need to navigate between the extremes of pious apologetic and moral dogmatism.” Idel’s recent Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism is an extended criticism of such an approach. While acknowledging historical and phenomenological spheres of influence, Idel prefers to avoid using value-laden concepts such as “incarnation” as a hermeneutical frame for describing Jewish notions of divine embodiment. This is not because he does not think there are mutual influences and striking similarities. Rather he argues it is best to stick as closely as one can to the language of the text and, when that is impossible, to create categories or models that can serve as theoretical frames for analysis. See the discussion of Idel’s approach in Ben in the Introduction. 23.  Idel, in “Leadership and Charisma,” 30 and 32, argues that Abulafia’s use of the term “son of God” to describe himself is quite different from “the Christian vision of Jesus as the incarnated.” While this is certainly true, I am less convinced than Idel that the terminology if nuanced in the proper ways does not apply. More generally, I believe that mystical literature is hyper-literal, thus its audaciousness is precisely in its translation of the metaphorical rendering of ideas in classical Midrash in a hyper-literal vein as it constructs a metaphysical world mirroring empirical reality. For example see Wolfson, “Revealing and Re/Veining,” 60: “this suggests, however, that the symbolic is, in fact, more tangible than the literal, or that the literal is actual to the extent that it concretizes the symbolic form.” 24.  For another approach see Green, “The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism.” 25. Weber, On Charisma, 18. 26.  The social category of leadership in Hasidism has been explored at length in Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidism after 1772”; Elior, Mystical Origins, 152–72; and Green, “­Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq.” 27. Weber, On Charisma, 19. 28. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 364, and Oakes, Prophetic Charisma, 27. 29.  See the Hasidic tale about Israel of Rizhin told in the name of Shai Agnon at the conclusion of Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 349–50. 30.  B.T. Gittin 60b and Rashi ad loc. This additional passage can be found in LM 3:178 and 179; editor M. Mykoff ’s long note 143 explains this elusive passage. 31. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 190–260, and Boyarin, Border Lines, 112–27. See also Neusner, The Incarnation of God. 32.  Nahman here differs from the logos theologies of both Boyarin and Neusner; in fact, Nahman’s entire project is distinct from the rabbinic attempt to see God in the text, an approach that began, perhaps, in the Deuteronomic school of the Hebrew Bible. See Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 196–206. Idel’s notion of the zaddik as the shamanistic vehicle and channel for divine effluence is very useful but does not cohere with Nahman’s stronger claim. See Idel, Hasidism, 189–208.

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33.  Nahman of Bratslav, Hayye Moharan (Jerusalem, 1991); hereinafter HM. 34. See HM, item 247. Note that this text is followed by the addition of the editor, who writes, “Do not be surprised at this [statement] since we have the patriarchs and Moses etc. for who is to really understand the depths of his intentions here. Simply one could say that what he intended to say was that his great innovation is unique in this particular manner, in this setting, and in this articulation.” This caveat is unsatisfactory because one could say such things about many individuals while Nahman surely had other ideas. See Liebes, “Ha-Hidush shel R. Nahman me-Bratslav.” Note that ­Liebes’s references to Shivhei ha-Ran almost all correspond to the later editions of Hayye ­Moharan under the identical subtitles. See also HM, item 254, where Nahman states that in the future his name will become so great that even someone who knew him will be considered a great hidush. Perhaps one can read this to mean that one who saw him face to face and heard his torah was surely transformed by witnessing his presence. This would relate to the early passages in LM I:19. 35.  On a comparison of Nahman to Moses, see HM, item 269. 36.  See Joseph Weiss, “R. Nahman and the Controversy Around Him”; Mendel Piekarz, Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, 56–82; and Arthur Green, Tormented Master, 94–123. 37.  HM, “On the Controversy about Him,” items 392 and 372. See also HM, item 264. The notion of the simultaneity of ancient and new is a play on the “new-ancient words” in the Zohar’s self-fashioning. See Daniel Matt, “‘New–­Ancient Words’: The Aura of Secrecy in the Zohar”; and Joel Hecker, “‘New Ancient Words’ and New–Ancient Worlds.” 38. Oakes, Prophetic Charisma, 177. 39.  Smith, “What a Difference a Difference Makes,” esp. 274–77, and Smith, Drudgery Divine, 36–53. 40.  On Nahman’s claim to be superior to Moses, see LM II:5 and Liebes, “Tikkun ha-Kelali of R. Nahman of Bratslav and its Sabbatean Links,” 123–27. See also Hazan, Kokhvei Ohr, “Hokhma u’Bina,” 139; Hazan, Sihot ve Sipurrim, 124; Mark, “Ha-Ma’aseh me-ha-Lekhem,” 415–52; Mark, “The Episode of the Armor and the Fixing of Nocturnal Emission,” 209, note 87; and Shore, “Letters of Desire.” 331. In at least one place in HM, item 395, Nahman compares himself to Abraham and Jacob, and see HM, item 279, where he views himself in the trajectory of Shimon bar Yohai, Isaac Luria, and the Baal Shem Tov, each one of whom brought a certain hidush to the world. About himself he says, “And now I begin to reveal completely wondrous new things (hadashot) that have never been revealed by any created being (‘al yedei shum nivra). See also HM with censored additions (Jerusalem, 2000), item 233. 41.  The notion that the zaddik takes part in creation and even alters it is not unique to Nahman. A startling comment by Elimelekh of Lyzinsk (1717–1787) suggests that the zaddik is given the capacity to partake in creation and through his study of Torah alters God’s plan. See his Noam Elimelekh, 277a. See also Jacobs, “The Doctrine of the Zaddik in the Thought of Elimelech of Lizensk,” and Rapoport-Albert, “God and the Zaddik as the Two Focal Points of Hasidic Worship,” 321. 42.  The notion of transcending human limitations and incarnation also comes into

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play on the question of Nahman’s death. If he is in fact a divine incarnation, he cannot die like other human beings. Ambiguity regarding Nahman’s death is discussed in Yemei Moharat, the autobiography of his disciple Nathan of Nemerov. See Weiss’s analysis in his Studies, 231–33. Piekarz, Studies, 139, has: “Not only this but there is a concealed Bratslav doctrine (sh-emunah Bratslavit ha-kemusa) that Nahman’s death was only an occultation (hitkasut ve histalkut) and that he would make a second, final, redemptive re-appearance.” See the more lengthy analysis in Mark, Megillat Setarim, 159–72. 43. See Tanna de be-Eliyahu Zuta, 4 in Tanna de be-Eliyahu (includes Raba and Zuta), Zuta, 8a. This phraseology was subsequently adopted as part of the traditional liturgy of the weekday morning prayer service. 44. Boyarin, Border Lines, 112–27. 45.  Compare this for example to the zaddikism of Moshe Hayyim of Sudilkov, the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, whose claim of charisma is founded on inheritance. On the hereditary vs. personal characteristics of charisma, see Weber, On Charisma, 56–58. See also Stephen Sharot, “Hasidism and the Routinization of Charisma,” 325. 46.  I was once told by a Hasid in Jerusalem that in a beit midrash (study house) he had found a copy of Likutei Moharan bound on both sides, a book that could never be read, a perfect example of text as sacrament. Another example of this is the story ­Nahman instructed his disciple Nathan to burn one of his texts before he died. On this see Ouaknin, The Burnt Book, 257–308. 47. Green’s Tormented Master is founded on this assumption. 48.  De Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” 920. 49.  On the zaddik as “oral torah,” see LM I:207. On the elevated status of orality as opposed to writing, see LM II:36, and on this subject generally see David Siff, “Likutey Moharan as the Eschatological Spiritual Torah,” 38ff. See also Eliezer Shore, “Letters of Desire,” 358–69. 50.  The notion of speech (sprache) as the primary form of language, or phonologism, that is superior to writing is a cornerstone of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. See, for example, the citation of his Cours de linguistique generale, 19, in Derrida, Of Grammatology, 30. Derrida’s deconstruction is founded on a critique of Saussure’s argument regarding the superiority of speech over writing. While not directly relevant to Nahman’s claim in LM 1:19 about witnessing the charismatic (zaddik) speak, the complex relationship between speech (here the speech of the zaddik) and the written word (the book, or Torah as written document) is endemic to the authority of the charismatic who challenges the institutionalization of religious teaching. 51.  More generally see Aaron, “Judaism’s Holy Tongue,” 49–107. The “holy” nature of lashon ha-kodesh is a central theme in Abraham Abulafia’s writings. On Abulafia and Hebrew, Idel notes, “the holy language is not Hebrew in its semantic aspect but rather Hebrew in its more fundamental aspects, namely the consonants and vowels and the principle of the combination of letters, which is one of the major sources for the diversification of languages.” Idel, “The Infant Experiment,” 70. See Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 204. “For both [the prophetic-ecstatic kabbalah and the theosophic-theurgic kabbalah] the ontic character of the natural language is not to be sought in its semantic

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morphemes, that is, particular cultural configurations of the language, but in the phonemic and graphemic potentiality contained in Hebrew as a conceptual grid to chart the character of language more generally. 52.  Franz Rosenzweig understands this in the opposite direction, that is, that revelation represents “the immediacy and pure presentness of the lived experience,” in one sense a disclosure of creation. Nahman here was interested in moving revelation back to creation in order to complete the process of revelation. On Rosenzweig’s notion on revelation and divine disclosure, see Wolfson, “Configuration of Untruth in the Mirror of God’s Truth,” 153–54. 53.  Sihot ha-Ran, item 245. 54.  The notion that the voice of God must be first embodied in the physical voice of the prophet appeared in Vital, Sha’ar ha-Gilgulim, 60a/b. See also the discussion in Idel, Enchanted Chains, 198. It appears Nahman was going beyond this idea to insinuate that the voice of the unique zaddik is, in fact, likened to the voice of God at revelation. 55.  LM I:22, 10. 56.  For a somewhat apologetic reading of this passage see Cheryn, Pearparot leHokhma. See also Green, Tormented Master, 319–20, and Idel, “Universalization and Integration,” 45. 57. Boyarin, Border Lines, 129. 58.  See Cheryn, Pearparot le-Hokhma, 33. 59.  LM I:19, 25c. See also Sihot ha-Ran, item 245. “One who has the heart to under­ stand and true desire can see from this the true nature of God eye to eye” (emphasis added). See also Rabinowitz, Resisei Layla, 56, 157–58, and Amira Liwer, “Oral Torah in the Writings of R. Zaddok ha-Kohen of Lublin,” 43–44. 60.  See b.T. Megillah 15a; Hulin 104b; Niddah 19b. 61.  HM, item 271. 62.  See Jaffe, Torah in the Mouth. 63.  It is important to remember than Nahman was teaching in the early nineteenth century, when Hebrew-language publishing began to flourish and the wide dissemination of books raised questions regarding what was sacred and what profane, what one was permitted to read and what was forbidden. For one example see Joseph Perl’s maskilic work Megaleh Temirin (“Revealer of Secrets”). The fear of books as “writing,” of course, goes back to Plato, but in the early era of printing, we find Jews such as Yosef Shalom Rofe DelMedigo (the Yashar mi-Candia, 1591–1665) lamenting the advent of printing in the introduction to his 1630 work, Novlot Hokhma. Printing further weakens the authority of the text by widening the circle of those who have access to wisdom. I want to thank Eliyahu Stern for this reference. 64.  LM I:19. This translation follows the manuscript version of LM attributed to Nathan of Nemerov and deviates from the printed editions. To buttress the implied connection to Moses it is worth noting that there was a similar teaching (not cited by Nahman, who almost never cited contemporaries) that appeared in the Maggid of Mezritch’s Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov, items 176 and 275. Dov Baer of Mezritch claimed that when Israel looked into the face of Moses they saw themselves. The context of this passage is the

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verse in Exodus suggesting that Israel suspected Moses of adultery after his separation from Zipporah (v’hebitu ahrei Moshe, they suspected Moses [Exod. 32:8]). The Maggid stated, “they looked into his face and saw an adulterer because they were adulterers.” On the face of the zaddik as the source for the elimination of haughtiness see LM I:135. 65.  See also LM II:2, 5, and 5a. In this shorter tangential discussion Nahman drew numerous connections between the perfected lashon ha-kodesh and Shabbat as opposed to the languages of the nations and the six days of the week. 66.  See Genesis Raba 31:8. For a use of that locution to describe “rich language” (lashono ashira) see Piekarz, “The Messianic Idea in Early Hasidism through the Lens of Homiletic and Mussar Literature,” 238. 67. See LM I:19, 26b where Nahman connected targum (translation) with tardema (sleep, referring to Adam’s sleep in order to create Eve, in Genesis 2:21) through numerical equivalence (gematria). The connection between Eva and language was developed in a similar direction by Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934). Bialik likened Eve to language more generally, what he deemed the curse of language that can never depict the essence of a thing. Nahman used Eve as a deficient yet necessary dimension of language (the language of targum or translation) that needed to be redeemed by the unique ­zaddik. On Bialik’s connection of language to Eve, see Biale, Not in the Heavens, 49 and 50. 68.  Moshe Mykoff prefers a more colloquial translation, “a play on words.” See LM 3, Lessons 17–22, 123, and our note 9. 69.  On the phallocentrism of Kabbalah that resonated quite strongly with Nahman’s reading of Eve and language, see Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines; and Wolfson, “Erasing the Erasure/Gender and the Writing of God’s Body in Kabbalistic Symbolism,” 49–78. 70.  For a different rendering of this midrashic play in early Hasidism see Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, Pri ha-Aretz, 37 and 38. 71.  Wolfson’s textured discussion in Language, Eros, Being, esp. 255–60 has been very helpful. 72.  See Bosk, “The Routinization of Charisma: the Case of the Zaddik,” 157, with a passing comment on Hahman in this regard: “Emphasizing the ‘magical’ hold of the zaddik, he claimed for himself the ability to help men return to the original state of creation.” Bosk’s intuitions were indeed correct, perhaps more than he knew. 73.  See Mykoff ’s translation in LM 123 and note 14. 74.  The passage can be found in Zohar 2.203a. I used Mykoff ’s translation (125) with slight alterations. For more on the language of the gentiles see LM I:33,2,3. There ­Nahman states that “[even] in all the languages of the nations one can find godliness, for without godliness nothing can exist.” He goes on to say that in these places apparently void of godliness God is concealed under many layers of zimzum. 75.  On the Zohar’s demonization of the gentile nations, particularly Christianity and Islam, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 129–54. 76.  HM, item 250 See also HM, item 251 where this sentiment continues. 77. See Shivhei ha-Ran, 22, item 18, “And he said, ‘For me man and a woman are the

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same.’ That is, there is no arousal when he sees a woman, everything is equal in his eyes, as if he saw a man.” 78.  For more on this see Green, Tormented Master, 167–70. See also HM, item 252, where Nahman states that “he had completely nullified his body.” 79.  On Nahman’s claim to have fixed Adam’s sin, see Shore, “Letters of Desire,” 331, note 1061 and Hazan, Kokhvei Ohr, 167–68. 80.  LM I:19, 26a. See also LM I 11:6 on the connection between brit, i.e., the phallus, and lashon, literally tongue that is rooted in Sefer Yezeriah 1:2. In relation to Nahman, see Green, Tormented Master, 179, note 60. 81.  See the beginning of LM I:19. The distinction between reading the torah of the unique zaddik and witnessing the words themselves remained a crucial distinction in Nahman’s thinking on this matter. 82.  LM I:19, 26b. 83.  LM I:19, 26b. For an extended Hasidic example of the notion of kelipat nogah, the dross that contains both good and evil, see Elimelekh of Dinov, Igra de-Kallah, vol. 2, parshat Hukat, 60c/d. 84.  See, for example, in Pearparot le-Hokhma, 33. “The secret of the serpent is the evil of the seventy nations which is the language of the three defiled husks, this is in the realm of the woman of folly who seduces Eve, who is the woman of wisdom, to lashon ha-kodesh, by means of deceiving her to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, which is the language of targum . . . So it is that the woman of intellect stands between the woman of folly and the woman of wisdom. 85.  See b.T. Pesahim 117a, cited in this homily that uses Psalm 32, “Of David, a maskil,” to suggest that the term maskil implies interpretation (turgeman). But the Hebrew word maskil ‫ משכיל‬depending on its vocalization can mean two different things: “intellect” and, if pronounced me-sakel, “a woman who loses her children,” in this case a woman of folly. So Nahman was suggesting that by succumbing to the serpent who embodied the woman of folly, Eve ingested a part of the serpent and thus represented targum that contains both lashon ha-kodesh and conventional or profane language. 86.  LM I:19.9, 27c (bottom). 87.  LM I:19.9, 27c (bottom). 88.  LM I:19.9, 27b. For another reading that fits quite nicely with this one, albeit with different intensions, see Gellman, “Wellhausen and the Hasidim,” 205 and 206. 89.  The connection between Nahman’s speech and repentance is discussed in other contexts as well, for example in Hayye Moharan with censored additions, “avodat hashem,” 470–71. “Everyone that he speaks with is drawn after him with great emotion. Even the evil ones in the holy city of Uman were compelled by him and were slowly aroused until they had notions of repentance, something they never had before. . . . By means of his holy words they had thoughts of repentance even though he never spoke to them about repentance or any holy matters at all!” See also Mark, Megillat Setarim, 99. The “evil ones” here likely refers to the heretics in Uman whom Nahman engaged in mundane matters such as chess. According to some, Nahman was drawn to Uman precisely to engage these Jewish heretics. See Piekarz, Studies, 21–55.

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90. Boyarin, Border Lines, 145–47. The Jewish nature of the Johannine community is the subject of an ongoing debate among scholars. Of late, some New Testament scholars have moved closer to the notion that the authors of John were indeed Jews. This is largely based on Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel. See also Meeks, “‘Am I a Jew?’” More recent work includes Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, xvi and 25–26, but see Hakola, “The Johannine Community as Jewish Christians?” where it is suggested that the Jewish-Christian John still presents significant textual difficulties. While John is clearly the most anti-Jewish of the four gospels, some scholars wonder whether in fact this is part of an internal polemic waged by Jewish-Christians who were expelled from the synagogue. In any case, for our limited purposes a Jewish John, however angry and heretical, would allow reconsideration of the correlation of John’s incarnational theology as a mutated outgrowth of Jewish logos theology rather than an adaptation of Hellenistic religion. The earlier notion that Christian doctrines such as “divine sonship” were the products of “incipient Christianity with Grecian Judaism” could be revisited. See Geiger, Judaism and its History, 234. Boyarin moves in this direction when he writes that Jewish Christians “did not distinguish themselves from non-Christian Jews theologically, but only in their association of various Jewish theologoumena and mythologoumena with this particular Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. The characteristic move that constructed what would become Orthodox Christianity was the combination of obviously Jewish messianic soteriology with equally Jewish logos theology in the figure of Jesus” (Boyarin, “The Gospel and the Memra,” 281). 91.  The notion of Christ being the incarnation of Torah, that is, the fusion of word and body, can be found in Gnostic Jewish/Christianity. This view is argued persuasively by Wolfson in “Inscribed in the Book of the Living,” 265–68 and 271. A similar idea regarding Jesus as the “revelation” is suggested in Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption. See also Schachter-Shalomi, Paradigm Shift, 35. 92.  See Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 190ff. 93.  In some sense this reverses Moses’s transferring Israel’s focus from him to the book in Deuteronomy. See Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 196–201. This coincides somewhat with John’s moving the reader’s attention from the book to the person of Jesus.

Chapter 3

1.  While this statement may not exactly be true in Jewish studies, there exists a Society of Jewish Ethics, complete with a national conference and a scholarly journal: “The Society of Jewish Ethics is an academic organization dedicated to the promotion of scholarly work in the field of Jewish ethics, including the relation of Jewish ethics to other traditions of ethics and to social, economic, political and cultural problems. The Society also aims to encourage and improve the teaching of Jewish ethics in colleges, universities and theological schools, to promote an understanding of Jewish ethics within the Jewish community and society as a whole, and to provide a community of discourse and debate for those engaged professionally in Jewish ethics.” See https:// www.facebook.com/societyofjewishethics/info.

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2.  Schweiker, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics. Similarly, Borowitz, Exploring Jewish Ethics, 17: “the authoritative Jewish sacred texts, the Bible and the Talmud, do not use the term ‘ethics’ or reflect so Hellenic an intellectual category. The holy, rather than the good, seems to be their most inclusive value.” 3.  Definitions of religion constitute an entire subfield of Religious Studies. For one very important contribution to this debate that has informed our understanding, see Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious.” 4.  See Smith, Imagining Religion, xi: “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.” 5.  Levene, “From Law to Ethics . . . and Back,” 192. 6. Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 115. 7.  I chose not to deal with a number of important works on Jewish ethics in this chapter, but they deserve mention: Shofer, The Making of a Sage; Halberstam, Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature; and Kavka, “Postmodern Jewish Ethical Theories.” 8.  For example, John 1:1 and 1:14a. 9.  The notion of Jesus as the second Adam, the completion of the development of humanity from physical to spiritual, is a popular trope in New Testament literature. For example, 1 Cor. 15: 45–49 and 1 Cor. 15: 22. On Adamic Christology more generally, see Dunn, Christology in the Making, 98–128. 10.  I Cor. 15:24. For example in Hegel’s argument for “absolute religion,” i.e., Protestantism, in which religion is built on the premise of incarnation, i.e., the divine becoming human. See Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 176–80; and Pinkard, Hegel, 201. More generally, see Jamros, “Hegel and the Incarnation” and Hodgson, “Hegel’s Christology.” 11.  The idea of reconciliation or incarnation as the basis for divine love and the ethical foundation of Christianity was part of Hegel’s early attempt to depict Christianity as a superior religion of modernity. In his early theological essays, written in the last decades of the eighteenth century, he juxtaposed Christianity to Judaism, arguing that the latter fails because its adherence to law prevents the development of ethics and love. Although many have criticized Hegel’s corrupt depiction of Judaism in these essays, the juxtaposition of law vs. ethics is one that has some resonance in Hasidic literature (of which he was, of course, unaware). See Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 182–301; Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, 3: 309–24. Later, in his Phenomenology, Hegel placed incarnation as the central idea that made his philosophical construction of Christianity the “absolute religion.” See Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 759, 459, and 460. 12.  See Genesis Rabba 8:10. In fact, none other than Paul makes a similar claim. See Schoeps, The Jewish-Christians Argument, 23. On the Bible and religion more generally, see Smith, “Bible and Religion.” 13.  See, for example, Exod. 40:34, 35 and 1 Kings 8:13. 14. Wyschogrod, Body of Faith, 204. See also Neusner, “The Question of Incarnation.” While Jews will argue that God’s presence of humanity is never in a person but

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only in history, we must consider whether this is a distinction in degree or in kind. Hasidism, while never fully reaching Christianity’s degree of incarnationalism, indeed considers the notion of divine embodiment in human form. 15.  A stark example of this is Abraham Abulafia’s Imrei Shefer, printed for the first time in Jerusalem in 1999, the main focus of which is the fact that the human being is a composite of divine names. The engraving of God’s name on the human body is a reflection of the engraving of God in the Tabernacle. See Deut. 12:5, 14:23–24, and the discussion in Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,” 243–44. 16.  See Green, “The Zaddik as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism.” 17.  Dan notes that the doctrine of the zaddik in Hasidism serves an antidote to the messianic person in Sabbatean theology. As opposed to the Sabbatean messiah figure, “the Zaddik is the ‘redeemer’ and intermediary only with reference to the group that believes in him, and only during his lifetime.” See Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics, 115. It should be added, however, that the zaddik as intermediary and the success of that doctrine in becoming a part of normative Judaism enabled the notion of incarnationalism in the righteous person to become absorbed into traditional Jewish thinking. 18.  On this see Magid, “Hasidism and Existentialism?”; Gellman, “Hasidic Existentialism?”; and Gellman, “Buber’s Blunder.” 19.  On this in Hasidism, see Magid, Hasidism on the Margin, 205–48. 20.  See Harakas, Toward Transfigured Life, 232–34. It would be interesting to compare the Eastern Orthodox notion of synergy to the doctrine of the zaddik in Zalman of Liady’s Sefer Amarim Tanya, esp. chapter 1. In that foundational Habad text, Shneur Zalman, attempting to isolate the make-up of the benoni (intermediate one), suggested that the imperfect zaddik who stood between the perfect zaddik and the benoni, was one whose evil inclination had been rendered inactive, yet still existed. See Shneur Zalman of Liady. Sefer Amarim Tanya, 5a/b. 21.  b.T. Shabbat 133b; Sota 14a; and Sifre “Torat Cohanim” to Leviticus, “Kedoshim,” 86. Maimonides listed “the emulation of God’s ways” as the first of eleven commandments (five positive and six negative) connected to ethics. See his preface to the first chapter of “Laws of Moral Dispositions,” in Mishneh Torah, vol. 1. More generally, see David Shapiro, “The Doctrine of the Image of God and Imitatio Dei,” and Greenberg, “Seeking the Religious Roots of Pluralism,” 387ff. 22.  Pri ha-Aretz was first published in Kopshtat in 1814. All translations are mine. 23.  This phrase is based on Isa. 60:7. The “rams of Nebaioth” were viewed as some of the most powerful animals. See Mesudot David. 24.  Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, Pri ha-Aretz, 120. 25.  See Tikkunei Zohar 100a/b and 130b. “Human limbs are all ordered according to the order of creation. Therefore, humans are called olam katan [“a small world”]. One who glorifies God with every limb is like one who brings divinity to the entire world.” See also Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5; Midrash Tanhuma, “Pekudei,” 3; and Zohar 1.70b. 26.  There are two variants in the text. One has “the place of the world [olam]” the other has “the place of humanity [adam].” The first variant is consistent with the Genesis Rabba text that is likely the source of this usage. The second seems to be the midrashic

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turn of the text, substituting the individual for the world, making God the full embodiment of the individual as he is the full embodiment of the world. It seems that the variant that reads “world” simply misses the creative correlation the author seeks to make. 27.  Maximus the Confessor, “Contemplative and Active Texts,” in Early Fathers of the Philokalia, E. Kadloubovsky and F.E. Palmer eds. (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 356, cited in Guroian, Incarnate Love, 33. 28.  For example, see my review essay, “Retelling Hasidism for the Twenty-First Century.” 29.  Genesis Rabba 78:9; Pesikta Rabati, 21. 30.  The shift of divine presence from the world or the Temple to divine presence in the human is quite common in Hasidic literature. For one telling example from early Hasidism, see Aaron of Karlin, Beit Aharon (Brody, 1875, r.p. Jerusalem 1987), 63d. 31.  On the human being (Jew) as the chariot of the four-letter name of God, see Vital, ‘Etz ha-Da’at Tov, 182d. “It says, ‘make for me a sanctuary and I will dwell amongst you’ [Exod. 25:8]. In the midst of Israel [b’tokham], and not in the midst of the sanctuary [b’tokho], as it says ‘on your holy sacrifices.’ That is, the Shekhina dwells in the bowels of a person, and that is his sanctity.” 32. Guroian, Incarnate Love, 19. 33.  See Mishna Rosh ha-Shana 1:2; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Sabbatical and Jubilee Years,” 13:13; and “Laws of Kings,” 8:10. Whereas the mishna was ambiguous as to whether the phrase “kol b’oley ‘olam” refers to Jews or all humankind, Maimonides clearly understood it to refer to humankind (or at least all righteous human beings) generally. 34.  On the connection between the evildoers in Isaiah and the lack of humility implicit in Menahem Mendel’s use of the verse, see b.T. Sota 8a. 35.  For another translation of this text, see Lamm, The Religious Thought of Hasidism, 420. 36.  The notion of autonomous righteousness may be an illustration of self-will, a state that Eastern Orthodoxy views as unnatural and abnormal even if it yields positive results. It is a deviant form of humanity’s existence because it does not recognize the divine source of the self. See Guroian, Incarnate Love, 19. 37.  For example Vital, Sha’ar ha-Gilgulim, 122–25; and more generally in Tishby, The Doctrine of Evil and the “Kelippah” in Lurianic Kabbala, esp. 28–38. 38.  “The thoughts of man’s heart are only evil all the time” (Gen. 6:5). 39.  Kedushat Levi was first published in Slavita (Slavuta, Ukraine) in 1798 and then in an expanded two-volume edition (the one used for subsequent printings) in Berdichev (Berdychiv, Ukraine) in 1817. 40.  See David Novak, The Election of Israel and the Idea of the Jewish People, 50–77, and Magid, “Ethics Differentiated from the Law,” 179. 41.  The notion of the very category of “Jew” as requiring the other is a topic of recent conversation among theorists. See, for example, Benbassa and Attias, Jew and the Other. They argue that there can never be a Judaizing of the world because the very notion of including the other in the Jew erases the category of Jew.

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42.  See b.T. Shabbat 31a. The full citation is as follows: “What you would not do to another, do not do to him. This is the entire Torah. Everything else is commentary. Go and learn.” 43.  See b.T. Makkot 24b; b.T. Horayot 8a; and Exodus Rabba 33:7. In Pesikta Rabati 22 there was a disagreement between Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi and the anonymous sages. R. Yehoshua argued (in concert with most other rabbinic sources) that Israel heard only the first two commandments directly from God. The rabbis said that they heard all ten directly from God. See also Rashi’s comment on Num. 16:3, where he had Korah use the direct communication between God and Israel as an argument against Moses’s alleged abuse of authority. 44.  Levi Isaac, Kedushat Levi ha-Shalem. All subsequent citations are from this edition. 45.  The direct connection made between the negative formulation of Hillel and Lev. 19:18 can be found in Sefer Mitzvot Gedolot, positive commandment 9; and Sefer haHinukh, commandment 243. 46.  Early midrashim correlate “I am the Lord your God,” the first divine/human commandment, with “Do not murder,” the first interhuman commandment, thus implying a relationship between these two realms of mitzvot. See Mekhilta of Rabbi Yishma’el, item 299. 47.  Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim, 30b. 48.  Underlying this connection between divine unity and the commandments of loving one’s neighbor is the kabbalistic idea, popularized in Lurianic Kabbalah, that “neighbor” (re’ekha) in this mitzvah really refers to God. See, for example, Vital, Sha’ar ha-Pesukim, 33a: “‘and you shall love your neighbor as yourself ’—this refers to your celestial Neighbor [i.e., God]. . . . Do not blemish Him, heaven forbid, when it says ‘to your neighbor,’ it means ‘I am God’; He is your neighbor.” 49.  The notion of Israel as one body, the body of Adam, is a fundamental notion in Lurianic Kabbalah that informed Levi Isaac’s approach. See, for example, Vital, Sefer Likutei Torah—Ta’amei ha-Mitzvot, 77a, “On the commandment of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Know: All of Israel is the secret of one body of the soul of Adam, as we have been made known. . . . Every Israelite comprises one specific limb of that body. All people [here referring only to Israelites] are dependent upon one another [and suffer the consequences] if they sin.” 50.  The limitation of re’ekha (“neighbor”) as Israelite in Lev. 19:18 is widespread in classical Jewish sources and unequivocal in the latter kabbalistic tradition. See, for example, Vital, Sha’arei Kedusha 2:4, 43; Vital, Sha’ar ha-Kavannot, “morning blessings,” 11d–12b; and Vital, Sha’ar ha-Gilgulim, Introduction and items 38, 333, and 334. In this seemingly expansive text it should be noted that Levi Issac’s attitude was generally quite negative toward the non-Jew. See, for example, Kedushat Levi ha-Shalem, 204, 232, and 398–400. I want to thank Glenn Dynner for bringing this text to my attention. 51.  For the classic example, see Mishna Avot 3:14. See also Yair Lorberbaum, Zelem Elohim: Halakha and Aggadah, esp. 84–105. 52.  See Guroian, Incarnate Love.

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53.  The notion of the Incarnation as constant in all of humanity and (re)lived through the sacraments is the basis of the work of the fourteenth-century Greek theologian and saint Nicholas Cabasilas (c. 1322–1395). See especially his Life in Christ. In Cabasilas and his more well-known predecessor St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) the notion of theosis or the divination of humanity played a central role. Relevant to our concerns, both suggested that the Incarnation of Christ “makes of us a temple of his divinity and enlightens our soul from within” (Cabasilas, 26). A thorough treatment of this in the work of St. Gregory Palamas can be found in Mantzaridis, The Deification of Man. 54. Mantzaridis, 71: “Love of God is the root of all virtue. . . . Love of God bears fruit in the form of love of one’s neighbor, which is the ‘sign’ of the believer’s life for Jesus Christ and the starting point of all social virtue.” 55. Mantzaridis, 15. Maximus the Confessor defined theosis this way. “A firm and trustworthy basis of hope for the deification of human nature is God’s incarnation, which makes of man a god in the same measure as God Himself became man” (14). 56.  Jones and Adams, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, 6:3699. 57.  St. Gregory of Palamas, Defense of the Hesychasts 3, 1, 34, cited in Mantzaridis, 31. 58.  In numerous places the Talmud makes reference to God performing commandments, but this does not imply that God is obligated to do so. Rather, the image of God performing commandments suggests a reciprocity that underscores God’s covenant with and love for Israel. See, for example, b.T Berakhot 6a–b. More generally see Faierstein, “God’s Need for the Commandments in Medieval Kabbalah.” 59.  See Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 17–92. 60.  For example, Moses Maimonides, “Laws of Kings,” 12:1, in Mishneh Torah, 6:104b in standard editions, citing b.T. Sanhedrin 91b. 61.  Whether the Hebrew Bible indeed is an “unphilosophical text” has recently been challenged by Yoram Hazony in his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. 62. Guroian, Incarnate Love, 27, 28. 63. Guroian, Incarnate Love, 2. 64. Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics, 111. 65. Guroian, Incarnate Love, 48. 66. Guroian, Incarnate Love, 16. 67.  See, for example, Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, 37: “No biblical or postbiblical Jewish writer ever depicted a human being literally as divine, nor did Jewish religious culture agree to accommodate the Hellenistic notions of ‘son of God’ and ‘­divine man.’ The designations, common in the terminology of ruler worship in imperial Rome and in the description of charismatic personalities in Hellenism, remained taboo in Judaism.” David Blumenthal is a bit more uncertain of this absolute negation. See his “Tselem,” 345–46. On the one hand he argues that “the doctrine of the incarnation is not beyond the Jewish theological imagination” and then equivocates by saying “Judaism cannot accept the doctrine of incarnation.” Perhaps Blumenthal is making a distinction, one that sits at the very center of my argument, that the notion of incarnation must be distinguished from its particular Christian instantiation. If this is correct it undermines

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Vermes’s position that the idea itself is a product of Hellenistic not Jewish thinking. This thesis, common among many Jewish theologians, has been duly challenged by Hurtado, One God, One Lord, and Hurtado, How on Earth did Jesus Become a God, 13–30. 68.  See Goshen-Gottstein, “The Body of God in Rabbinic Literature”; GoshenGottstein, “Judaisms and Incarnational Theologies”; Michael Fishbane, “Some Forms of Divine Appearance in Ancient Jewish Thought”; David Stern, “Imitatio Hominus”; Neusner, The Incarnation of God; Boyarin, Border Lines, 112–27; Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels; and Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus, 103–49. 69.  Wyschogrod, “A Jewish Perspective on Incarnation,” 204. 70.  See b.T. Avodah Zara, 3b; Menahot, 29b and 53b. See also Goshen-Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” and Wolfson, “Images of God’s Feet.” 71. Neusner, Torah, 4; Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,” 246–51; and Urbach, Hazal, 28–52. On aniconism and Judaism see Bland, The Artless Jew. 72.  Wolfson, “Iconic Visualization,” 139, and Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation.” 73.  See Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, 45–53. 74.  On the penetrability of the divine/human divide in rabbinic literature, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 15: “Characteristic of the mystical theology of the Hebrew Bible is the relative separation of the divine and human realms, and of divine and human action: the one is heavenly and transcendent, the other earthly and historical. This does not mean that the two spheres are absolutely impenetrable from either side . . . nor does it mean that there is no correlation between the two realms.” 75.  The beginning of Philippians 2 deals with kenosis or divine emptying. Phil. 2:5–11 is often used as a call for ethics founded on the kenotic principle of the emptying of the self toward the other. See, for example, Cronin, Kenosis. On kenosis in Hasidic literature, see the chapter about Ya’akov Koppel of Mezritch below. 76. Guroian, Incarnate Love, 30 and 31. 77.  Jacob Neusner offers a Jewish definition of incarnation as follows. “The description of God, whether in allusion or narrative, as corporeal; exhibiting trait of emotion like those of human beings; doing deeds that women and men do in the way in which they do them.” Neusner, The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism, 17. While this definition may suffice for classical Rabbinic Judaism I find it inexact when applied to our Hasidic texts. This is because Neusner’s definition and the texts he cites in his book are focused on how humans describe God as human. The Hasidic texts are more interested in describing how humans are divine. The latter, I suggest, is much closer to the Christian idea. Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 312, note 51. 78.  Neusner acknowledges that Judaism rejects the “particular framing” of Christian incarnation but, in concert with Wyschogrod, this rejection is not in principle, only in fact. See Neusner, The Incarnation of God, 6; and Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation: The Imaginal Body of God,” 240. Larry Hurtado suggests another model in his One God One Lord, 99–124. He suggests that the Christian notion of incarnation is a “mutation”

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of a Jewish idea. He does not imply “mutation” in the negative sense but rather the way it is used in the biological sciences “a description of a sudden and significant development in the species” (162, note 20). Hurtado’s notion of mutation is helpful because as it maintains a link between the ancient Jewish early Christian ideas it also suggests that post-biblical Judaism still has the core notion of divine embodiment that Christianity “mutates.” Given that fact, it is not far-fetched to posit that later Judaism could make similar kinds of “mutations.” Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 312, note 52. 79. Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 312, note 53. Michael Wyschogrod writes, “My claim is that the Christian teaching of the incarnation of God in Jesus is an intensification of the teaching of the indwelling of God in Israel by concentrating that indwelling in one Jew rather than leaving it diffused in the people of Jesus as a whole. From my perspective such a severing of any Jew from his people is a mistake because, biblically, God’s covenant partner is always the people Israel and not an individual Jew.” Wyschogrod, “Incarnation of God’s Indwelling in Israel,” in his Abraham’s Promise: Jewish and Jewish-Christian Relations, R. Kendall Soulen ed. (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, U.K.: Eeerdman’s Publishing, 2000), 178. Wyschogrod here asserts that the Incarnation as doctrine is a distinction in degree and not in kind from the Jewish notion of indwelling. In this spirit, I suggest that our Hasidic texts extend divine indwelling beyond its conventional borders until it reaches the limits of incarnational thinking. This would satisfy Wyschogrod because the Hasidic texts do not limit incarnation to one person but present it as a possibility to all. 80. Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 312, note 56. In Christianity see, for Lars Thunberg, “The Human Person as Image of God,” in Christian Spirituality, B. McGinn and J. Meyendorff eds. (New York: Crossroads, 1995), 293–95. In Judaism, see Urbach, Hazal, 190–94; and Yair Lorberbaum, Zelem Elohim, esp. 84–105. 81.  The notion of divine indwelling in Judaism applies to the land of Israel and the Temple, e.g., Exod. 40:35, 36; I Kings 8:13. For some examples see Exod. 25:8, “And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them”; and Deut. 33:15, “Since the LORD moves about in your camp to protect you”; Jer. 49:38; Mekhilta d Rebbe Yishmael, Sidra d’Piskha, chapter 14; and Sifri Bamidbar, parshat Zav, 94. 82.  See Urbach, Hazal, 29ff. 83.  This is not to suggest that the rabbis knew they were moving toward Christian theology. I suggest that sometimes strains of Judaism that are less or even unaware of Christian teaching exhibit a closer proximity to certain Christian ideas than modern types that are aware of Christian teaching. This is partly because modern Judaism must construct its identities in light of, and in opposition to, Christianity while more traditional Judaisms have no such need. This is one of the central arguments in this book. 84.  See, for example, Ps. 84:2, 132:12–14; Ezek. 19:3–4 and 34:1–4. 85. Ezek. 10:3–4 and 43:1–4. 86.  For a discussion of this disagreement between the school of R. Akiva and the sages see Urbach, Hazal, 40–43. 87.  See for example Pirkei Avot 3:4, Sifra, “Kedoshim” 4:12; Urbach, Hazal, 191–93; and Lorberbaum, Image of God, 84, 89–101.

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88.  There is, however, a correlation drawn between the human and the Temple, for example, that does make such a connection. See Lorberbaum, Image of God, 436–53. 89.  See, for example, Harakas, Wholeness of Faith and Life, 17. 90.  For the classical depiction of indwelling and also the rabbinic construction of “the image of God” in man, see Urbach, Hazal, 29–52 and 189–226, and Goshen-­ Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature.” 91.  See Buber, “Love of God and Love of Neighbor,” 223. 92.  Philo of Alexandria is explicitly excluded. Philo lived and wrote just before the turn of the common era, i.e., before the rise of Rabbinic Judaism, and did distinguish between interhuman and divine/human mitzvot. Because he was not known as a Jewish thinker until the sixteenth century, however, for the purposes of this essay his work does not constitute “classical Judaism.” 93.  Mishna Yoma 8:9; b.T Rosh ha-Shana 18b; Yoma 85b, 86b. See also Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Repentance,” 2:8 and 9. 94.  This is most explicit in his Mishneh Torah, vol. 1, “Laws on Moral Dispositions,” chapter 1. 95.  For a useful English collection of courses, see Weiss and Butterworth ed., Ethical Writings of Maimonides. See also Fox, “The Doctrine of the Mean in Aquinas and ­Maimonides”; Schwarzschild, “Moral Radicalism and ‘Middlingness’ in the Ethics of Maimonides”; Lawrence V. Berman, “The Ethical Views of Maimonides within the Context of Islamicate Civilization”; and more generally, Jacobs, “The Relationship Between Religion and Ethics in Jewish Thought.” 96.  See Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics, 13: “The source of authority [for medieval Jewish ethics], therefore, was the ancient revelation of God to Moses and the people of Israel on Mount Sinai, when the Torah was given, and all ethical (as well as legal) decisions are derived from the correct understanding of the contents of that revelation. Medieval Jewish ethics are based on the feeling that this answer is insufficient.” 97.  On ethics and the law in Judaism, see Mittlemen, A Short History of Jewish Ethics, 6–10; Louis E. Newman, Past Imperatives, 17–82; and Boaz Cohen, Law and Tradition in Judaism. 98.  See the Bibliography for full citations. See also Rose, “Ethics and Halacha,” 25– 32, and for an analysis and critique of Rose, Solomon, “Judaism and Modernity.” 99.  One of the more explicit examples of supererogation as part of the law can be found in Mekhilta, “Yitro,” 2: 198, cited and discussed in Lichtenstein, “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” 109. On lifnim me-shurat ha-din, see Shear Yashuv Cohen, “Lifnim me-shurat ha-din”; Bleich, “Is There an Ethics Beyond Halakhah?”; and Louis E. Newman, Past Imperatives, 17–44. 100.  Lichtenstein, “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of ­Halakha?” 119, “Does the tradition recognize an ethic independent of Halakha? You define your terms and take your choice.” 101.  See Borowitz, “The Authority of the Ethical Impulse in ‘Halakha’,” 501. The question of women is the place where Gillian Rose believes the integrity of the halakha

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is most profoundly challenged. She agrees with Borowitz’s raising of the question but disagrees sharply with his solution. See Rose, “Ethics and Halakha,” 31–32. 102. Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, 63. 103. Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, 76. For another position on the relationship between law and ethics in Judaism, see Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics, 2–5. 104.  See the comprehensive study by Heinemen, Ta’amei ha-Mitzvot b’Sifrut Yisrael, and more recently Joseph Stern, Parables of the Law, esp. 1–13. 105. Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, 72. 106.  Michael Wyschogrod, in The Body of Faith, 181–82, notes: “Ethics is the Judaism of the assimilated. . . . [B]y adopting the religion of the ethical, the assimilating Jew retains a certain spiritual self-respect, which was threatened by his guilt at abandoning the faith of his fathers. When we add to this the gentile respect earned by an ethical stance, we have an inevitable strategy for the assimilating Jew. . . . The ethics that was torn from its setting in the faith of Israel and from the context of the covenant and the historic reality of the Jewish people has thus become another strategy for Jewish self-alienation.” 107.  See Sagi, Judaism, 316–34. See also Novak, The Election of Israel, esp. 50–77. 108.  See Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics, 1–15. 109.  Buber, “Love of God and Love of Neighbor,” 220. 110.  Buber, “Religion and Ethics,” 95. 111.  Buber, “Religion and Ethics,” 96–97. 112.  See b.T. Megillah, 11a.

Chapter 4

1.  See Green, “The Zaddik as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism.” As for the doctrine of the zaddik as the only real innovation of Hasidism, see Piekarz, The Beginnings of ­Hasidism, 28–304, and Piekarz, Hasidut Polin, 157–80. See also Elior, The Mystical Origins of Hasidism, 126–51; Idel, Hasidism, 189–208; and Etkes, “The Zaddik.” Following Max Weber, Sharot in “Hasidism and the Routinization of Charisma,” 328, describes the zaddik as a “mystagogue.” 2.  See Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 8–139. In b.T. Yoma 38b: “R. Yohanan says, ‘The world would be established even for the sake of one zaddik, as it says, and the zaddik is the foundation of the world (Prov. 10:25).’” See also b.T. Hagigah 12b, Genesis Raba 75:11, and Midrash Tehillim to Psalm 136. See also Azriel of Gerona’s Commentary to the Aggadot, 34; Zohar 1:208a. Arthur Green’s depiction of the zaddik in the textus classicus of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, focuses exclusively in the zaddik as yesod; see his A Guide to the Zohar, 145–50. 3.  See Scholem, “Shekhina,” On the messiah as malkhut in Sabbateanism, see ­Liebes, On Sabbateanism and its Kabbalah, 279–80. On the problematics of malkhut and the feminine in the Zohar, see Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, 306–17. There are instances here where Joseph is considered a messiah figure, e.g., Scholem, “Apocalyptic and Messianic Chapters Concerning R. Mordechai Eisenstadt,” 555–56. 4.  See, for example, Idel’s Messianic Mystics, esp. 187–98. The transposing or perhaps

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splitting of the zaddik in Sabbatean doctrine may have precedent in Lurianic teaching that may intend to interpret rabbinic doctrine. Lurianic Kabbalah develops a higher zaddik and a lower zaddik, the biblical Benjamin the lower zaddik (yesod of nukva) and Joseph the higher zaddik (yesod of zeir anpin). See Vital, Sha’ar ha-Kavannot, “Keriyat Shema” 6, 147. This may be rooted in the dual messiah theory in rabbinic literature, the messiah of Joseph and messiah of David. 5. See Zaddik Yesod ‘Olam, published by Levi Krakofsky, a student of Yehuda ­Ashlag. Also Liebes, in “Sefer Zaddik Yesod ‘Olam,” 70–76, claims it was written by the Sabbatean Leibele Proznitz. 6. Liebes, On Sabbateanism and Its Kabbalah, 55. 7. Liebes, On Sabbateanism and Its Kabbalah, 54. 8.  See Elior, The Mystical Origins of Hasidism, 126–51; Idel, Messianic Mystics, 212– 47; Altshuler, The Messianic Secret of Hasidism, esp. 1–13 and 152–64; and Wolfson, Open Secret. 9.  See Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 93–94; and Wolfson, Along the Path, 80–82. Malkhut is also sometimes called the seventh sefirah and yesod the sixth counting from hesed. 10.  Tishby, “Between Sabbateanism and Hasidism.” 11.  Sha’arei Gan Eden was first published in Koretz (now Korets, Ukraine) in 1803. Earlier, Koppel’s work was circulated in manuscript. The question of zaddikism as the sine qua non of Hasidism has not gone without critical scrutiny. See, for example, ­Piekarz, Ha-Hanhaga ha-Hasidit, 15–59. 12.  Tishby, “Between Sabbateanism and Hasidism,” 204–26. Koppel’s Sabbateanism is accepted as true by Liebes. See his “Sefer Zaddik Yesod ‘Olam, esp. 53. 13.  In Koppel, the lower half of the tehiru or empty space produced by the divine contraction or zimzum that produced the conditions for creation in one version of ­Lurianic Kabbalah. The tehiru is a kabbalistic idea made popular by Israel Sarug and later Nathan of Gaza. It refers to the space created by the zimzum in Lurianic Kabbalah. It is usually divided into two sections, the upper tehiru that houses the parzufim and sefirot and the lower tehiru that is the place of the demonic, where the fallen sparks remained trapped. The question of where the messiah is actually rooted is a complicated one in Sabbatean literature. Nathan of Gaza, in his “Drush ha-Taninim” published in Scholem, Be-Ikvot Moshiah, 14–52 argues that the messiah is rooted in the lower portion of the tehiru, or kelippot. See, for example, Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 304–5. 14.  On this see Fine, Physician of the Cosmos, Healer of the Soul, 124–49, and Magid, “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning.” 15.  For a note regarding the incarnational nature of Sabbateanism, see Liebes, On Sabbateanism, 69. 16.  The term is replete in Lurianic Kabbalah in reference to malkhut or shekhina. In the Zohar it is used more judiciously. See, for example, Zohar 1.168b, 1.181a, Zohar 1.132b, 135a. The term is also used in reference to Metatron, e.g. Zohar 1.124b. 125a, 1.179b. It is also used in reference to David (malkhut) in Zohar 1.140a which may strengthen my claim that this notion of emptiness has eschatological or messianic import as well.

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17.  On the term “cruciform” see Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God. 18.  See Martin and Dodds, eds., Where Christology Began. See also Hengel, The Son of God, 1– 2. For the closest correlates to this notion in the New Testament, see Colossians 1:15–20; Timothy 3:6; and Peter 3:18–22. Some argue that the hymn is actually prePauline and Paul incorporates it into his letter to admonish the Philippians and draw them close to the conduct of humility. See, for example, Levine and Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 357. Morna D. Hooker argues that whether the hymn is Paul’s invention or predates him, it appears in Philippians in a “Pauline” way. See her From Adam to Christ, 88–100. See also Kreitzer, “‘When He at Last is First!’” 122, note 1. The use of Philippians 2:5–11 as the source of Christology is challenged by James D. G. Dunn, who offers a more anthropological and less theological rendering of the hymn. See his Christology in the Making, 113–28. 19.  Crossan and Reed, In Search of Paul, 290. On this point Gorman (25) notes, “Christ’s divinity, and thus divinity itself, is being narratively defined as kenotic and cruciform in character.” Crossan and Reed focus on viewing this notion of divine emptying as a Christian response to the Roman imperial notion of the embodiment of God in the human as exemplified in power. Gorman (16, 121–22) writes, “These overlapping echoes together suggest that the text portrays the preexistent Christ as the self-emptying ‘form of God’—in contrast to the self-exalting Adam and self-glorifying Roman ­emperors— who, by virtue of his self-humbling incarnation to the status of a slave and consequent death by crucifixion, is the fulfillment of the Isaianic servant of God and thus the one worthy of universal acknowledgment and worship as Lord.” Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 16, 121–122. 20. Gorman, 33. See also Gorman, 119: “In Christ Paul does not know a God of power and weakness but the God of power in weakness. God is cruciform.” See also Savage, Power Through Weakness. 21.  In the Midrash Pesikta Rabbati (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997–1999), 21:16, there is a similar idea, that God descends into the grave with the righteous as a depiction of His humble and sacrificial nature. The notion of the suffering God in Jewish mysticism is quite rich. See, for example, Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading.” 22.  See Bauckham, “The Worship of Jesus in Philippians 2:9–11.” 23.  The eschatological resonance of Philippians 2 is the central thesis of Ernst Käsemann’s seminal essay “Kritische Analyze von Phil 2, 5–11,” published in English as “A Critical Analysis of Philippians 2, 5–11.” 24.  See, for example, Deuteronomy 8:14; Psalms 131:1, 2; and Mishna Avot 6:6. 25. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 292. 26.  See b.T. Yebamot 49b. 27.  This notion of the zaddik as the pure channel for divinity plays a large role in Hasidism. See, for example, Idel, “Zaddiq as ‘Vessel’ and ‘Channel’ in Hasidism.” 28.  On this Steven Cassedy notes, “In Russian theology the term [kenosis] serves as a sort of negative corollary to incarnation, which emphasizes the divine presence in matter.” See his “P. A. Florensky and the Celebration of Matter,” 95.

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29.  Other articulations of this in Maimonides can be found in Mishneh Torah, “Laws of the Foundation of the Torah,” chapters 6 and 7, and Guide of the Perplexed, I:59 and III:51. 30.  For a reasonably clear statement on the inability to apprehend God, see Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I:59, 139. See also Guide III: 21, 485. 31.  See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of the Foundation of the Torah,” 1:10. See also Blumenthal, “Maimonides: Prayer, Worship, Mysticism.” 32. Maimonides, Hakdama le-Mesekhet Avot, 7, in his Hakdamot le-Perush haMishna, 199–200. Some commentators on Maimonides are less willing to acknowledge the limitations he suggests. See, for example, Shem Tov ibn Falaquera’s commentary to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, Moreh ha-Moreh, 134. One can see similar unitive experiential approaches to Maimonides in Abraham Abulafia’s commentary to the Guide of the Perplexed, Sitrei Torah. 33.  See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed I:37, where Maimonides invokes the biblical notion of “face to face” to describe the limits of Mosaic apprehension. See also Guide I:59. Kenneth Seeskin offers a concise definition of Maimonides’ position. “­Although Maimonides often speaks of getting close to God, we must keep in mind that ‘closeness’ in this context involves a measure of irony: we are close to God to the degree that we recognize the unbridgeable nature of the gap that separates us.” Seeskin, Jewish Messianic Thoughts in an Age of Despair, 47. For the Zohar’s rendition of the same event see Zohar 2.82a using the biblical verse, “He was there with YHVH” (Exod. 34:28). 34.  See Maimonides, Guide III:9, 436–37. 35.  These apparent contradictions as to the state of Mosaic prophecy are discussed in Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, 130–36. He concludes that “Maimonides offers contradictory perspectives. The contradictions in this instance cannot be resolved by any of the criteria that Maimonides lays out in the Introduction to the Guide. See also Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, III: 986–87, where he discusses religious experience in Maimonides in relation to the theurgic kabbalists. 36.  See, for example, Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, 125–87; 326–92. 37.  See Ivry, “Maimonides and Neoplatonism”; Wolfson, “Via Negativa in Maimonides and Its Impact of Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah.” See also Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 166, 175, and Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, 403. 38.  See Idel, “Maimonides and Kabbalah”; Wolfson, “Beneath the Wings of the Great Eagle”; and Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism. Wolfson challenges Idel’s categorization of ecstatic vs. theurgic Kabbalah in regard to Maimonidean influence. While it is surely the case that Abulafia viewed his kabbalistic teaching, even his unio mystica, on Maimonidean grounds, he claims that theurgic Kabbalah did not follow suit. Wolfson shows through numerous examples that in fact theurgic kabbalists also used Maimonides, both structurally as well as substantively, to develop their views on mystical experience, unitive and otherwise. While Wolfson is correct to subvert the more rigid models established by Idel and his reading of Maimonidean influence in theurgic Kabbalah is sound (although in the Zohar Maimonides was not prominent and in Lurianic Kabbalah he all but disappeared), perhaps in the post-Lurianic period when

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Koppel was active the Maimonidean influence was less overt. Perhaps the rationalist interpretation of Maimonides that arose in Enlightenment figures made Maimonides less attractive to kabbalists. Or, perhaps the disinterest in philosophy in general among early modern traditionalists, illustrated in the disinterest in serious study of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in traditional institutions of Jewish learning, at least among kabbalists in Eastern Europe, made the use of Maimonides for mystical purposes less relevant. Mention must be made of the significant influence of Maimonides on Habad Hasidism as well. See Wolfson, Open Secret, 80–87. 39. Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, 73–178, and Idel, “Universalization and Integration.” 40.  It is important not to overstate this resistance. In his lecture on Abulafia in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 122–23, Scholem suggest that “we find that ecstatic experience does not play the all-important part one might expect. . . . [O]n the whole, Kabbalistic meditation and contemplation takes on a more spiritualized aspect. . . . [I]t is only in extremely rare cases that ecstasy signifies actual union with God, in which the human individuality abandons itself to the rapture of complete submersion in the divine stream. Even in this ecstatic frame of mind, the Jewish mystic almost invariably retains a sense of the distance between the Creator and His creature.” For one attempt to contextualize Scholem’s reticence about mystical experience, even in mystics such as Abulafia, see Magid, “Gershom Scholem’s Ambivalence Toward Mystical Experience and His Critique of Martin Buber in Light of Hans Jonas and Martin Heidegger.” 41.  See Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God, esp. 87–124, and Wolfson, “Weeping, Death, and Mystical Ascent in Sixteenth Century Jewish Mysticism.” The simulation of death in kabbalistic ritual is a central tenet of Lurianic piety. The most salient discussion can be found in the mediations of the Nefilat Apayim (supplicatory prayer) that is part of the morning and afternoon prayer service and the Bedtime Shma. See in Pri Etz Hayyim, gate 49 and gate 17, in Kitvei ha-Ari, vol. 13, 293–303 and 319–43. In Sha’ar haKavannot, see Kitvei ha-Ari, vol. 8, 302a–313d. For an in-depth analysis of this material see Ish-Shalom, “Radical Death.” The notion of death, used perhaps euphemistically, to describe the necessary requirements for the acquisition of Torah can be found in the name of Resh Lakish, “Said Resh Lakish, ‘Words of Torah [divrei Torah] are not established except in one who kills oneself for it, as it is written, “This is the Torah, one who dies in a tent” (Num. 19:14)’” (b.T. Shabbat 83b). On other notion of ecstatic death in the Talmud see Baba Batra 17a; and Midrash Shir ha-Shirim Raba 1:16. In accordance with their often hyperliteral rendering of Scripture and rabbinic teaching, kabbalists explore the death motif through ritual performance and contemplative methods of imagining one’s own death. The correlation between poverty and death, already extant in rabbinic literature, is used in the Zohar as an illustration of how God descends upon the humble/ impoverished on account of God’s shekhina. See Zohar 2:158b. 42.  See, for example, Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar”; Green, A Guide to the Zohar, 91–94; Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 190–260; and Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 286–316. 43.  See, for example, Avodat ha-Kodesh, III:5, vol. 2, 212–15. More generally see

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Tishby, “The Doctrine of Man in the Zohar.” In note 23 Tishby refers to the soul as divine in the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, “The author of the Zohar does not stress the divinity of the soul in the same way as the Christian mystic, but the two views do have a certain similarity” (italics added). On Eckhart and Kabbalah see Wolfson, “Patriarchy and the Motherhood of God in Zoharic Kabbalah and Meister Eckhart.” Our point here is simply to note that the Zohar’s doctrine of the soul as divine may have played a role in Hasidism’s extension of that idea to talk more forcefully and openly, about the divinity of the zaddik who is nothing less than perfected state of the human in this world. 44.  See, for example, Zohar 1.176b. 45.  See Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 289, note 8. “A similar phenomenon, as we shall see, is discernible in kabbalistic works of piety, where humility is linked thematically to the first of the emanations, Keter, the crown that is portrayed as ayin, or nothingness.” 46. Cordovero, Tomer Devorah, 2:71. 47. Cordovero, Tomer Devorah, 2:72. The connection between tolerance and humility is made in Rashi’s comment to “And Moses the most humble of all men.” (Num. 12:3). See also Rashi to b.T. Zevakhim 17a on Noah’s righteousness. On keter in Kabbalah see Green, Keter, esp. 121–33. 48. Cordovero, Tomer Devorah, 9:139. 49. Cordovero, Tomer Devorah, 9:139. 50.  Numbers Rabba 11:1. See also Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 291. “The midrashic comment is occasioned by the discrepancy between the Masoretic spelling of the word aniyyim ‘the impoverished,’ and the accepted pronunciation of the word as anawim, ‘the modest.’” 51.  Hayyim Vital, Sha’arei Kedusha ha-Shalem, part 2, gate 4, 52. See also Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot, 2:2. “It is not a good path for the human to simply be humble, he must be contrite in spirit [shefal ruah] and his spirit must be very diminished.” 52.  The more common messianic triad of “Adam, David, Messiah” appears throughout kabbalistic literature. See, for example, Idel, Messianic Mystics, 187–97, and, in Sabbateanism, Riemer, “The Mystery of Adam, David, Messiah.” 53.  For a rich discussion utilizing these and other texts in relation to kabbalistic formations of selfhood in sixteenth-century Safed, see Eitan Fishbane, “A Chariot for the Shekhina.” 54.  For a general discussion of Mosaic prophecy see Kreisel, Prophecy, 210–21. On Maimonides’ epistemology more generally see Joseph Stern, “Maimonides’ Epistemology.” 55.  There is also a strong tradition of Adam’s ascension to heaven in some intertestamental literature, e.g., The Life of Adam and Eve; The Ascension of Moses, 37; and Testament of Abraham. For these texts as crucial for the early Christian notion of Jesus, see Scroggs, The Last Adam. 56. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 311. See also a similar sentiment in Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, 68–69: “That the anthropos is made in God’s image

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implies that God is made in the image of the anthropos. . . . [T]o attribute human form to God is to attribute divine form to humans.” 57.  Clement of Alexandria, Propteptikos, cited in Guroian, Incarnate Love, 15. See also the words of Maximus the Confessor, “A firm and trustworthy basis for hope of the deification of human nature is God’s Incarnation which makes of a man a god in the same measure as God Himself became man. For it is clear that He who became man without sin can also deify nature, without transforming it into the Deity, raising it to Himself in the measure that He humbled Himself for man’s sake.” Maximus the Confessor, Contemplative and Active Texts, 368. 58.  In describing devekut, Idel uses the term “apotheosis.” “It should be noted that this immersion of the soul of the mystic does not assume a state of total fusion with the light but a certain kind of apotheosis whose main feature is the acquisition of the divine aura that surrounds his soul.” Idel, “Universalization and Integration,” 36. 59.  More precisely, “Lord Jesus Christ . . . did, though his transcendent love, become what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he is himself.” Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5, preface 1, cited in Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 5. 60. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 5. 61.  Parting of the ways is a notion that has occupied the attention of scholars of late antique Judaism and early Christianity. Recently this idea, which tracks the separation of Christianity from Judaism, has received new critical attention. See, for example, the essays collected in Becker and Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted. 62.  For a long discussion about the motif of kenosis as a model of Christian devotion see Cronin, Kenosis. 63. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 7. 64. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 57–104. 65.  For New Testament parallels of Jesus’s humility see Matthew 23:12; Luke 14:11 and 18:14; and John 13:16. 66. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 125. 67.  There is much written on malkhut and shekhina in the Zohar. For the classical analysis see Scholem, On the Mystical Shape, 88–139. For its connection to ­Maryology see Green “Shekhina, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs.” For other views see Schaefer, Mirror of Her Beauty, 118–36 and 173–216; Abrams, The Female Body of God in Kabbalistic Literature; and Wolfson, Circle in the Square. 68. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 43. 69. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 176–77. The notion of divinity as occupying even the lowest places of creation exists in Zen as well. See, for example, Lenn Evan Goodman’s comment in his Monotheism, 3. 70.  The term is ubiquitous in the Lurianic corpus. The most systematic discussion of the concept appears in fourteen long drashot in Etz Hayyim. The most readable edition is Etz Hayyim, vol. 2, in Kitvei ha-Ari, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1988), 221–62. 71. Cordovero, Pardes Rimonim, vol. 2, gate 23, chapter 1, 7a. See also Tikkunei Zohar, 134b. 72. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, and Wolfson, Circle in the Square.

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Scholem notes that the masculine aspects of the shekhina began to appear in the Zohar but he never develops this insight. See Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 183, 186, and Zohar 1.232a. 73.  See Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidism after 1772.” 74.  On Sarug, see Scholem, “Yisrael Sarug—Talmid Ha-Ari?” 214–43, and Ronit Meroz, “R. Israel Sarug, Student of the Ari.” Sarug’s Limmudei Azilut was a widely read kabbalistic work by pre-Hasidic mystics in Eastern Europe and was also a central text for the Sabbatean Nathan of Gaza. In part Tishby’s claim that Koppel was a Sabbatean comes from his use of Nathan. 75.  Most recently see Pawel Maciejko, Mixed Multitude; Rapport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi 1666–1816, esp. 157–296; and Michaelson, “‘I Do Not Look to Heaven but What God Does on Earth.’” 76.  Tishby, “Between Sabbateanism and Hasidism,” 209–20. The open polemic against Sabbateanism does not, by definition, make one an anti-Sabbatean. We see this for example with Moshe Hayim Luzatto (Ramhal), who wrote an entire treatise against Sabbateanism, Kinat ha-Shem Zeva’ot, yet his relationship to Sabbateanism was far more complicated. See Tishby, Messianic Mysticism, esp. 223–53. “Secret Sabbatean” is a term used by Liebes to describe the author of Zaddik Yesod ‘Olam. See Liebes, On Sabbateanism, 65. Another example is the anonymous Hemdat Yomim, which was very popular among Hasidic masters. In these cases kabbalistic works exhibit an adaptation of the Sabbatean interpretation of Lurianic Kabbala, in many cases founded on the teachings of Israel Sarug, but never mention Sabbatai Zevi by name or openly advocate the abrogation of halakha. Therefore, they are printed and disseminated and served as the Sabbatean foundation of Hasidic spirituality. 77.  Tishby, “Between Sabbateanism and Hasidism,” 205–6. 78.  See Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar.” See also Scholem, “Tzaddik.” 79.  See Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar,” 26–34, and Wolfson, “Occultation of the Feminine and the Body of Secrecy in Medieval Kabbalah,” 113–54; Wolfson, Open Secret, 28–65; and Daniel Matt, “New-Ancient Words,” 181–207. 80.  Scholem’s essay “The Neutralization of the Messianic Idea in Hasidism” began an entire industry on the question of messianism in Hasidism. Suffice it to say that the present state of scholarship leans toward a position that messianism does indeed function as an active trope in Hasidism, early and late. For two examples, see Dan, Jewish Messianism in Modernity, 118–203; and Idel, Messianic Mystics, 212–47. See also Piekarz, The Beginnings of Hasidism, 280–302, and Idel, Hasidism, 189–208. 81.  See Jacobs, “The Uplifting of the Sparks in Later Jewish Mysticism.” See also Jacobs, “Eating as an Act of Worship in Hasidic Thought,” 157–66. For one explicit example in Koppel see SGE, 39c. 82.  It is Sabbateanism’s construction of previous kabbalistic metaphysics to conform to the messianic vocation of Sabbatai Zevi that is its most creative hermeneutical turn. See Liebes, “Sabbatai Zevi’s Relation to his Conversion,” in On Sabbateanism, 20–34. 83.  See Scholem, “Redemption through Sin.” In Nathan of Gaza, Sabbatai Zevi, as

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messiah, is likened to the holy serpent (nahash ha-kadosh), which descends into the netherworld (the lower portion of the tehiru) to complete creation that was left unfinished by the rupture of the vessels and the original sin of Adam and Eve. 84.  The pursuit of Sabbatean heresy became a veritable industry in early modern Europe. See Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy. See also Liebes, “Sefer Zaddik Yesod ‘Olam,” 306, note 54. 85.  See, for example, Liebes, “Sefer Zaddik Yesod ‘Olam.” This not only the case with Hasidism. Liebes argues that a similar phenomenon occurs in the mystical circles around the Vilna Gaon and that the kabbalistic works of Menahem Mendel of Skhlov and Yizhak Izik Haver (Waldman) integrate Sabbatean doctrine into their opposition to Sabbateanism. See Liebes, “Talmidei ha-GRA,” and Liebes, “The Letter Zadi and the Attitude of the Vilna Gaon and his Circle toward Sabbateanism.” 86.  See Green, “The Zaddik as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,” and Idel, Hasidism, 189–207. 87.  On the fluidity of gender in Kabbalah, see Wolfson, “Crossing Gender Boundaries in Kabbalistic Myth and Ritual,” in Circle in the Square, 79–122; and more recently Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, esp. 142–89. See also Liebes, “Zohar and Eros”; Jacobson, “The Feminine Aspect in Lurianic Kabbala”; and Idel, Kabbalah and Eros. 88.  For a concise description of the world of rupture (olam ha-nekudim) in Lurianic Kabbalah, see Vital, Ozrot Hayyim, 5a–16d. 89. On zot as the feminine attribution of malkhut see Rojtman, Black Fire on White Fire, 68–98. 90. Sarug, Limmudei Azilut, 7a. 91.  On this see Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 111–42; Mopsik, The Sex of the Soul, 5–52. See also Magid, “‘The Ritual Is Not the Hunt.’” 92.  See Wolfson, “Circumcision, Vision of God, and Textual Interpretation,” in Circle in the Square, 29–48. 93.  Sabbatean teaching often portrays Sabbatai Zevi as an embodiment of malkhut for example in depicting him as Saturn (the seventh planet). See Idel, Messianic Mystics, 187–97. 94.  See Wolfson, Open Secret, 26–28; Avrum Ehrlich, The Messiah of Brooklyn, 12– 23; and Avraham Baruch Pevzner, ‘Al ha-Zaddikim. Moses as the seventh in the line of righteous/messianic figures is rabbinic in origin. See Midrash Bereshit Raba, 19:7. 95.  See Wolfson, Open Secret, 20 and 312, note 109. 96.  In his Sefer Zaddik Yesod ‘Olam Liebes shows convincingly that indeed yesod is the operative sefirah of the messiah (i.e., Sabbatai Zevi) in almost all Sabbatean literature. See especially pages 54 (and notes) and 304, note 29. It is thus curious that Koppel, in Liebes’s opinion as Sabbatean, should place such emphasis on malkhut as a central motif of its messianism in his Sha’arei Gan Eden. An added complexity emerges in ­Luria’s sefirotic depiction of the two messiahs, the messiah of Joseph (tiferet or yesod ) and the messiah of David (‘ateret yesod or, perhaps, malkhut). In any case, I submit that Koppel’s focus on malkhut and the connection to the zaddik is atypical of Lurianic and Sabbatean tradition.

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97.  The interface and overlap between yesod and malkhut is also found in the writings of Abraham Abulafia. See, for example, in Wolfson, “Kenotic Overflow and Temporal Transcendence,” 137. Relevant to our interest here, Wolfson also shows how Abulafia sometimes posits malkhut as a yod, also the letter relevant to keter the highest sefirah sometimes referring to eyn sof. The attribution of yod has two sources; the first orthographic, the letter yod is shaped like a half-circle that appears like a vessel; and numerical, malkhut is the tenth sefirah and yod represents the number ten. While it is unlikely Koppel would have known these Abulafian sources, it is curious that both seem to present malkhut as both the empty and full of the divine. 98.  For a different description that may speak to the same idea, see Zaddik Yesod ‘Olam, 42a. “But the letter ‫[ ה‬referring to malkhut] is concealed in the essence of God.” 99.  For example, see SGE, 17a (bottom). 100.  On the doctrine of the sefirot, see Moshe Hallamish, An Introduction to Kabbalah, 121–66. On parzufim see Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos, 124–49; Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 16–33; and Giller, Reading the Zohar, 105–24. 101. SGE, 21c. 102. SGE, 21c/d. 103.  See, for example, Green, “Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq,” 127–56, and Rapoport-Albert, “God and the Zaddik as Two Focal Points of Hasidic Worship.” For an example of malkhut as including all the other lights, see SGE 76b (bottom): “it has already been explained that malkhut is called et (‫)את‬, which includes all of the 22 letters of the alphabet from aleph to tav.” 104.  Each world and each sefirah has its own set of ten sefirot. In the Lurianic tradition, this results in an infinite regress in which every set of ten can be subdivided into ten ad infinitum. 105. ‘Olam ha-Malbush (the World of Garments) is a Sarugian idea concerning the highest realm of the cosmic emanation even before zimzum. See Sarug, Limmudei ­Azilut. It is also very common in Nathan of Gaza and subsequent Sabbatean literature. See SGE, 18b, 22b, 47b. See also Idel, “Between the Kabbala of Jerusalem and the Kabbala of Israel Sarug.” See also Wolfson, “The Secret of the Garment in Nahmanides.” 106. SGE, 21d. 107.  See SGE, 30d. “See and understand malkhut is always constructed from the malkhut above it, in and of itself [minei u bei]. This is the secret of lighting from one candle to another.” 108. SGE, 30d. 109.  This plays the most prominent role in the Beit El school of the eighteenthcentury kabbalist Shalom Shar’abi. See Giller, Shalom Shar’abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El, 19–54. See also Kallus, “The Theurgy of Prayer in the Lurianic Kabbalah.” 110. SEG, 22a. See SGE, 53a, for a more conventional understanding of malkhut and its lack of a representative vowel. 111.  See Idel, “Zimzum and Its History”; Magid, “Zimsum as a Trope of Reading in Post-Lurianic Kabbala,” 163–214; and Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading.”

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112.  See SGE, 48d: “The root of malkhut is hidden in eyn sof which is the secret of the middle point. From there the light from this middle point emanates outward to all sides and creates an empty place where the worlds will be created.” 113.  See SGE, 7c (bottom): “The space of the tehiru is made from the point of ­malkhut and the lights in the tehiru are made from the remnant of the light of malkhut.” On surrounding and straight light see Pachter, “Circles and Lines.” 114. SGE, 22b. 115.  See, for example, Vital, “Sha’ar ha-Kelalim,” in Kitvei ha-Ari, vol. 1, 2d. 116.  On a beit kibul as a requirement for defilement see b.T. Shabbat 65a. 117. SGE, 24a. See also SGE, 17c (bottom). 118.  In general on the transition from Lurianic Kabbalah to Hasidism, see Jacobson, From Lurianic Kabbalism to the Psychological Theosophy of Hasidism. 119. SGE, 21d. 120. SGE, 24a. On yesod as the live zaddik, see Vital, Sha’ar ha-Likkutim, the end of drash seven of “Zot ha-Berakha.” On ben ish hai as the live yesod, see Vital, “Sha’ar haKelalim” to Etz Hayyim in Kitvei ha-Ari, vol. 1, 2b/3a and 3d. The notion of a live yesod is often a reference in kabbalistic literature to an erect penis, which is a play on the phrase ‘aver hai (erect phallus). See Vital Sefer ha-Likkutim in Kitvei ha-Ari, vol. 15, 230, and Pri Etz Hayyim, “Sha’ar Lulav,” in Kitvei ha-Ari, vol. 14, 632a/b. This is likely all based on Genesis 45:26: “And they told him, Joseph is still alive [‘od Yosef hai],” ­Joseph being yesod. This declaration is one that renews the possibility of redemption from Egypt and brings Jacob out of mourning for the loss of his son. The erotic rendering of Joseph as the phallic power that, when erect (hai, lit. “alive”), serves as the catalyst for divine effluence is commonplace in the Zohar and subsequent kabbalistic literature. If we substitute the Hasidic zaddik for Joseph we can see the phallic power that is implied there. On how this works in Sabbatean literature, see Leibes, “Zaddik Yesod Olam,” and Wolfson, “The Engenderment of Messianic Politics,” 203–58. 121. SGE, 24a. 122.  On Ephraim of Sudilkov, see Brill, “The Spiritual World of a Master of Awe.” On Elimelech of Lizhensk see Shatz-Uffenheimer, “On the Nature of the Tzaddik in Hasidism,” 365–78. More generally see Idel, Hasidism, esp. 189–208. On Israel of Ruzhin see Assaf, The Regal Way. 123.  See, for example, Piekarz, Beyemei Zemikhat ha-Hasidut, 280–330; Verman, “­Aliyah and Yeridah”; and Naor, “Ascent and Descent in the Yom Kippur Rite.” 124.  On “corporeal worship” in Hasidism see Kaufmann, “In All Your Ways Know Him,” and Kaufmann, “Le-Kayyem Taryag ‘ad Eyn Ketz.” See also Buber, “The Beginnings of Chassidism.” And for a recent take see Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 116–55. 125.  See, for example, Kallus, “Like a Flame Attached to the Coal.” 126.  I have intentionally refrained from entering into a discussion of the gender dynamics implied when the zaddik/messiah is moved from the male yesod to the female malkhut. There is, of course, much to say on this point but it is not directly relevant to this essay. 127.  See Assaf, ed., Zaddik and Devotees.

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128.  See Etkes, “The Zaddik.” On this shift from text to person in Kabbalah in the sixteenth century see Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 196–221. 129.  See Tishby, Messianic Mysticism, esp. 223–88 and 486–528; and Liebes, “The Letter Zadi and the Attitude of the Vilna Gaon and his Circle toward Sabbateanism,” 225–306. 130.  On the Sabbatean links to Bratslav Hasidism see Liebes, “Tikkun ha-Kelali of R. Nahman of Bratslav and its Sabbatean Links.” 131.  See Wolfson, Open Secret. 132.  See Fishbane, Kiss of God, 87–124. 133. Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, 94. 134.  See Michael Fishbane, “‘The Holy One Sits and Roars’”; Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading”; and Magid, “Origin and the Overcoming the Beginning,” esp. 169–74. 135. Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, 95. Abraham ibn Ezra comments that Song of Songs is certainly not about desire. But see Carey Walsh, who writes in Exquisite Desire, xi: “The Song of Songs is a depth charge into the nature of desire itself.” See also Brettler, “Unresolved and Unresolvable.” Song of Songs was a central text for kabbalists. See Wolfson, “Asceticism and Eroticism in Medieval Jewish Philosophical and Mystical Exegesis of the Song of Songs,” and Green, “Intradivine Romance.” 136. Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, 95. 137. Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, 94. 138. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, 59. 139. Wolfson, Open Secret, 273 and 276. The notion of the secret as a device to conceal the fact that there is no secret is explored by Wolfson in numerous studies. See, for example, his Abraham Abulafia—Kabbalist and Prophet, 38–93.

Chapter 5

1. On Toldot Yeshu see Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 32–49; Biale, “Counter-History and Jewish Polemics Against Christianity”; Dan, “Toldot Yeshu”; Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 48–50; and Limor, “Judaism Examines Christianity.” 2.  Most recently, see Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi. See also Berlin, Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writings on Christianity and Jesus; Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus; Vermes, Jesus in His Jewish Context; Levine, The Misunderstood Jew; Prothero, American Jesus, 229–66; Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth; Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus; Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; and Heschel, The Aryan Jesus. 3.  See Sandmel, We Jews and Jesus, 51. Sandmel’s book was originally published in 1965 and was perhaps the first study of the Jewish Jesus by a Jew in English in the postwar period. For recent work see the essays collected in Garber ed., The Jewish Jesus. 4.  See, for example, Frankel, “The Invention of Liberal Theology.” 5. Buber, Moses, 123. 6.  Christian work on the nineteenth-century historical Jesus was collected and

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analyzed in Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, first published as Von ­Reimarus zu Wrede in 1906. 7.  See, for example, Ariel, “Christianity through Reform Eyes,” and Ariel, “Wissenschaft des Judentums Comes to America.” Asch wrote extensively about Jesus, including a 700-page novel, The Nazarene, about the life of Jesus. He was criticized mercilessly in the Jewish press and eventually wrote a book, What I Believe, to defend himself. 8.  On the Brenner affair see Govrin, The Brenner Affair, and Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 90–116. On Jesus in Israeli society, see Lapide, Israelis, Jews, and Jesus. 9.  This argument is made most explicit in the Brenner book, which describes the New Testament as “our book, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh,” referring to Adam’s description of Eve in Genesis 2:33. See Govrin, The Brenner Affair, 136–37, cited in Biale, Not in the Heavens, 91. 10. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 99 and also 154: “The immediacy of the whole man is directed toward the whole God, that which is revealed in him and that which is hidden. It is the form in which Pharisaic Judaism by its doctrine of the middot renewed the Old Testament Emunah, the great trust in God as He is, in God be He as He way.” Buber places what he calls Pharisaic Judaism in opposition to Paul, although for Buber this pure Pharisaism is not what filters down into contemporary Judaism via halakha or Kabbalah. In a 1917 letter Buber asks Gustav Landauer to reconsider his critique of the Pharisees in an essay Landauer submitted for publication in Der Jude. Buber wrote, “I grant you, the term [Pharisee] is established and unmistakable; but don’t you think that we Jews should not go along with this tendentious distortion of a concept by the Evangelists, at least not when Jewish matters are under discussion, so that the real historical Pharisees are inadvertently associated with the term.” The Letters of Martin Buber, 208. 11.  Numerous Christian critics of Buber (some of whom were also admirers) maintained that Two Types of Faith was, as Emil Brunner put it, “a major attack on Christianity.” See Brunner, “Judaism and Christianity in Buber,” 313; and Balthasar, Martin Buber and Christianity. 12. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 12. 13.  See Diamond, Martin Buber, Jewish Existentialist, 174. There were accusations that his depiction of the Yehudi ha-Kodesh (R. Yaakov of Pryzuscha) in his novel For the Sake of Heaven had a Christian bias. See Schaeder, The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, 393. Buber also referred to Jesus as “the great Nazarene” in the preface to his early work The Legend of the Baal Shem, xi, originally published in 1908. Yet he seemed quite clear about his feelings for Jesus when he wrote in his open letter to Mahatma Gandhi in 1939, “I would not deny however, that although I should not have been among the crucifiers of Jesus, I should also not have been among his supporters. For I cannot help withstanding evil when I see that it is about to destroy the good” (The Letters of Martin Buber, 485). 14.  Emmanuel Lévinas, in an under-examined essay entitled “Judaism and Christianity,” sounds surprisingly like Buber in many regards. See Lévinas, In the Time of the Nations, 161–66. 15.  See Buber’s letter to Franz Werfel (March 17, 1917), cited in The Letters of Martin

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Buber, 214. Christianity “has turned the meaning and the ground of Jesus upside down. . . . Therefore I mean to and will fight for Jesus against Christianity.” 16.  See Kramer, “Rehearing Buber’s Jesus Deepens Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” 17.  Shmuel Bornstein first published his father’s Avnei Nezer in 1912. 18.  See Gerson Cohen, “Esau as a Symbol in Early Medieval Thought.” The first apologia of the Edom-Rome connection appeared in Sefer Yosippon, a tenth-century adaptation of Josephus composed in southern Italy. See Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, 1–30. 19.  See Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” 26–27. Once this identification had been made and accepted, all the classical associations, biblical as well as rabbinic, connected with the name of Esau and his descendants could come into play in connection with Rome. The dominant feeling in all of Hebrew literature is summed up in Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai’s comment: “It is an axiom: Esau hates Jacob.” See Sifre to Numbers 69. See also Herr, “Edom.” 20.  Hans Urs von Balthasar held that even as Buber paid lip service to a critique of both in essence he was really claiming that it is the Christian and not the Jew whose religion has gone astray into the realms of the gnostic. See Balthasar, Martin Buber and Christianity, 75. 21.  There has been much written on Buber’s misinterpretation of Hasidism. We will not enter into that debate as our concern is not whether Buber offers an accurate rendition of early Hasidism—clearly he does not—but the connection of his work on Jesus to his work on Hasidism. Perhaps the earliest critique of Buber’s rendering of Hasidism appears in a letter to Buber by Micah Josef Berdyczewski, April 9, 1908. See The Letters of Martin Buber, 115. For the classic critiques of Buber and Hasidism see Scholem, “­Martin Buber’s Interpretation of Hasidism,” and Shatz-Uffenheimer, “Man’s Relation to God and World in Buber’s Rendering of the Hasidic Teaching.” For some defenses of Buber see Kepnes, “A Hermeneutical Approach of Buber’s Hasidism,” and Silberstein, “Modes of Discourse in Modern Judaism.” For three noteworthy appraisals of this debate, see Levenson, “The Hermeneutical Defense of Buber’s Hasidism”; Idel, “Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism”; and Gellman, “Buber’s Blunder.” For an analysis of Buber and Hasidism in the larger context of European neo-Hasidism, see Ross, A ­Beloved Despised Tradition; and Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal. 22. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 162. See also the discussion in Shaeder, The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, 399–405. 23.  On the messianic emphasis of even many Zionist secularists see the comment in Keren, Ben Gurion and the Intellectuals, 109: “Biblical scholars, like other intellectuals, willingly, perhaps even eagerly, joined in the promotion of the messianic ideal of the state.” Buber’s critique of Ben Gurion on numerous fronts is well known. See, for example, Buber, A Land of Two Peoples, 164–68 and 239–45. 24.  Buber makes numerous statements that amount to the same thing. See, for example, his “The Renewal of Judaism,” 45–46. 25.  Berry, “Buber’s View of Jesus as Brother,” 211. On his belief in Zionism as having the ability to unify the Orient and the Occident, see Schaeder, The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, 134–35.

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26.  The similarities between Hasidism and Christianity, or the Baal Shem Tov and Jesus, were actually common in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth among Jewish writers with whom Buber was quite familiar. One example would be Simon Dubnow. On Dubnow’s History of Hasidism, Robert Seltzer writes: “The History of Hasidism marches along almost section by section abreast of [Renan’s] Origins of Christianity: how the sect grew in militancy, defied the outdated authority of its opponents, survived persecution, assembled its literature, and eventually proliferated into splinter groups.” See Seltzer, Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism,” 111. 27. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 173–74. Buber hoped that even as Christians remained wedded to their narrative about Jesus, Judaism’s openness (though his writings) would enable them to more readily view themselves in companionship with, and not in opposition to, Jews. See Berry, Mutuality, 87. 28.  For a discussion of this, see Brod, “Judaism and Christianity in Buber’s Work.” Earlier in that essay (327) Brod notes: “Buber admits, however, that in Judaism there were strong elements comparable to pistis and conversely in Christianity there were components of the personal emunah. The boundaries are not rigidly fixed, nor must the common elements be overlooked.” 29.  The question of Jesus’s relationship to the Pharisees and his complicated relationship to the law has been taken up by many scholars. For a particularly insightful analysis specifically in regards to the law, see Sanders, Jesus and Judaism. 30. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 62. 31.  Buber, “Redemption,” 205. 32.  On a concise distinction between emunah and pistis in Buber’s thought, see Buber, “Redemption,” 205. See also Buber, Two Types of Faith, 26. 33. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 58–59. On this see Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 43: “In this sense, the theological controversy that we think exists between Jews and Christians was already an intra-Jewish controversy long before Jesus.” 34. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 79. 35. Biale, Not in the Heavens, 152. Another good example of the counter-history hypothesis, albeit not labeled as such, can be found in Deutscher’s “The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays,” 25–41. 36. In A Believing Humanism, 115, Buber wrote: “[T]here is nothing as apt to obscure the face of God as religion.” Buber, A Believing Humanism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 115. 37.  Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal-Shem,” 90. 38.  For a further distinction see Brod, “Judaism and Christianity in Buber’s Work,” 325. 39. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 29. 40.  Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal-Shem,” 109–10. See Gellman’s “­Buber’s Blunder,” for a sustained critique of Buber’s assessment of Hasidism. 41.  Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal-Shem,” 93. 42.  Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal-Shem,” 93, 95–96. 43.  Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal-Shem,” 96.

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44.  Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal-Shem,” 99. 45.  Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal-Shem,” 109. 46.  Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal-Shem,” 111. 47.  On the notion that Hasidism never abandons the world, even as it utilizes Kabbalistic gnosis as its metaphysical template, see Buber, “The Foundation Stone,” 83–88. For a critique of this assertion see Gellman, “Buber’s Blunder,” 27–37. Buber’s attempt to de-messiahize the messianic ideal comes through similarly in his attempt to see Hasidic zaddikism not as the veneration or worship of the singular zaddik but as an exemplar of righteous behavior. See Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 128–55. 48.  Buber, “Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis,” 247–48. 49. Buber, I and Thou, 85. 50. Buber, I and Thou, 249. For the pejorative description of Kabbala as gnostic and the distinction between Kabbala and Hasidism, see Buber, “Symbolic and Sacramental Existence,” 174–78. Buber’s consistent negative assessment of the gnostic in favor of a kind of panentheism should be understood in light of the gnostic-pantheistic debates of early twentieth-century Germany in which he participated. See Lazier, God Interrupted, 93–110. 51. Buber, Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 10. 52. Buber, I and Thou, 252. See Buber, “Jewish Mysticism,” 10. The original, Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, was published in 1906. On Hasidism as “hallowing the everyday,” see Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, 180–81, and more generally, Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, 171–216. 53.  See Novak, Jewish-Christian Dialogue, 81–83: “What Buber vigorously rejects, however, is the ordering of the present I–thou relationship with God by the structure of law, which can only be from the past” (83, emphasis in the original). 54.  The classic studies of Jesus in the Talmud are Johann Maier’s Jesus von Nazereth in der talmudischen Überlieferung and R. Travis Herford’s Christianity in Talmud and Midrash. Some of their conclusions were recently challenged by Schäfer in his Jesus in the Talmud. In the complex nature of deciphering Jesus in rabbinic and other late antique literature see Freund, “The Myth of Jesus in Rabbinic Literature.” 55.  See Vermes, “Jewish Literature and New Testament Exegesis.” This is not to say Jews in the rabbinic period did not care about Christianity; they likely cared a great deal. In fact, Israel Yuval argues that much of their self-fashioning was in opposition to Christianity even though they rarely engaged it directly. See Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, 22–26, and Boyarin, Border Lines. 56.  Marc B. Shapiro claims that Christmas is also never mentioned in post-rabbinic responsa literature. The term Nittel is used to refer to Christmas. See Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” 321. 57.  Much of the talmudic material appears in b.T. Sanhedrin 104a/b. There are numerous censored and uncensored manuscripts that exclude various elements of the story. See Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 15–24. 58.  There are other figures, such as the biblical Jonah, who may be veiled references to Jesus. See, for example, Liebes, “Yona ben Amitai as Moshiah ben Yosef,” 269–311. 59.  See in b.T. Sota 47a, where Jesus’s name is not mentioned, and b.T. Sanhedrin

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107b, MSS Munich 95, where the magician is called “Jesus the Nazarene.” On Toldot Yeshu see Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 32–49; Biale, “Counter History and Jewish Polemics Against Christianity; Dan, “Toldot Yeshu”; Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 48–50; and Limor, “Judaism Examines Christianity.” The Standard ­English translation of Toldot Yeshu is The Jewish Life of Christ: Being the Sepher Toldot Yeshu, trans. G. William Foote and M. Wheeler (London: Progressive Pub. Co., 1885). A new edition of that translation appeared with an introduction by Madalyn Murray O’Hair in 1982 from American Atheist Press. The O’Hair edition has been reproduced in full in Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, 353–407. 60.  See Berger, ed., The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages. Another influential book was Hizzuk Emunah by the sixteenth-century Karaite polemicist Isaac Troki. 61.  One example among many can be found in Isaac Abravanel’s Yeshu’ot Meshiho. See also Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages. 62.  See Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve.” 63.  For sources in Hasidism, see Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” 330–35. 64.  See, for example, Isaiah 34:5–7; 63:1–6; Ovadia 1. Rabbi Akiva seems to have been the first to equate Edom with Rome. See Jerusalem Talmud Ta’anit 4.8, fol. 68d. 65.  I have not been able to locate the Lurianic source that explicitly designated Jesus as the gilgul of Esau. 66.  This comment enters into a complex web regarding the relationship in classical sources of Edom-Esau-Rome-Christianity. As Gerson Cohen argues, there are two distinct traditions, one Ashkenazi and one Italian/Sephardic as to whether there is any connection between Edom and Rome/Christendom. And if such a connection exists, it is theological or ethnological? Cohen’s essay does not extend to the sixteenth century when Luria’s comment was ostensibly made. It is, however, worth noting a few things. First, inserting the language of gilgul adds a third dimension to the theological-­ ethnological binary. Second, the sources cited in Cohen and collected in Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jews from medieval sources (mostly Sefer Yossifon and Sefer ha-Yashar) make no mention of Jesus, only Christendom. While Luria’s insertion of Jesus (as oto ha-ish) as a reincarnation of Esau is obviously based on the rabbinic sources linking Esau-Edom-Christianity it opens a whole new series of associations that make Bornstein’s reading possible. While accepting the Edomite-Roman-Christian triad already stated in rabbinic sources, Bornstein’s interest are more focused on the figure of Jesus as both Jacob’s “brother” and the carrier of Israel’s poison. See Cohen, “Esau as Symbol,” and Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jews, I:415–20 and notes. 67. Bornstein, Shem me-Shmuel, vol. 1, parshat mi-ketz, “Hanukkah, second night,” 202–3. 68.  It is noteworthy that Christians often depict the Jews as Esau. See examples in Cohen, “Esau as Symbol,” 32–38; and Yuval, Two Nations, 12–17. This interpretation seems to be largely based on Paul 6:6–13 and Galatians 4:21–31. The focus on gilgulim was common among Polish kabbalists beginning in the seventeenth century. See Liebes, “Yona ben Amiti as Moshiah ben Yosef,” 5 in the web version.

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69. In 1911 the Brenner Affair in the Palestine Mandate focused on precisely this problem in Russia. 70.  See, for example, Yuval, Two Nations, 20: “Unlike other pairs of brothers in Genesis, whose rivalry ended in murder (Cain and Abel) or exile (Ishmael and Isaac), Esau and Jacob knew how to forgive one another and to make up after decades of jealousy, separation, and exile. When Jacob returned from exile to the land of his fathers, Edom goes back to being the brother of Israel.” 71.  See I Maccabees 12. Jonathan’s letter appears in 12:6–23. The Spartans’ reply appears in I Maccabees 14:20–23. There is a scholarly debate as to the authenticity of the letter. See Katzoff, “Jonathan and Late Sparta.” This is one reason given as to why the Pharisees and later rabbinic sages had little interest in the Hasmoneans. For example, the one mention of the Hanukkah story in the Babylonian Talmud does not mention the Hasmonean victory and substitutes as heretofore unknown story of the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. 72.  The principle of min be-mino means various things in rabbinic literature. In discussions of dietary laws we read that two self-same elements, one permitted and one forbidden (e.g., untithed wheat mixed even in the smallest amount with tithed wheat), make the mixture prohibited, whereas two different elements (e.g., untithed wheat mixed with tithed barley) is only prohibited if the untithed grain gives recognizable taste to the mixture. See, for example, Mishna Halah 3:10; Orlah 2:6; Birurim 3:10. The idea that two self-same elements do not constitute an interruption can be found in b.T. Sukkah 37b and Zevahim 110a. 73.  For two examples see Vital, Likutei Torah / Ta’amei ha-Mitzvot, 56a, in reference to circumcision, and Shlomo Elyashuv, Sefer ha-De’ah, part 2, drush 4, section 4, 39d, in reference to the prohibition for Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge before sunset on the sixth day of creation. 74.  A similar approach was taken by the early Hasidic master Pinhas of Koretz regarding secular science in his Imri Pinhas ha-Shalem, I: 474–75, cited in Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, 268. 75.  By the Middle Ages these ambiguous figures were understood to be references to Jesus. 76.  This idea can be refracted in similar ways in Sabbatean literature referring to Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam. 77.  An alternative to this approach can be seen in a text describing the Sabbatean Wolf Eibshutz’s account of Nittel Nacht. “At the time of Hanukkah, Wolf pointed to eight lights against the firmament, and when Christmas Eve arrived, he said: ‘Lo and behold! The entire world, even the great sages tell us to play cards on this night, but we will not do so. We will be destroying the kelippot!’ And he took a violin and started to sing songs and cried a great cry.” Emden, Sefer Hitabbkut, 40 a/b, cited in Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude, 201. 78.  b.T. Shabbat 21b. 79.  Shem me-Shmuel, vol. 1, “Hanukkah, second night,” parshat mi-ketz, 202–3. 80. Zohar 1.52a. On this see Cooper, “A Medieval Jewish Version of Original Sin,” 448.

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81.  Shem me-Shmuel, mi-ketz, “Hanukkah—sixth night—1917,” 222. 82.  See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, esp. 1–32. 83.  Genesis Rabba 65:5, 884 in Albeck edition. 84.  Shem me-Shmuel, mi-ketz, 1928, I:166c/d. 85.  Shem me-Shmuel, mi-ketz, 1928, I:166c/d.

Chapter 6

1. Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus, 2. 2. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospel, 6–7. 3. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospel, 43. 4.  See Hurtado, One God, One Lord; Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God; Newman, Davila, and Lewis, The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism; Adela ­Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God; and Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel; and Bauckham, God Crucified. 5.  On Boyarin’s reading of Metatron, see Boyarin, “Beyond Judaisms, 323–65. For Schäfer on Metatron, see The Jewish Jesus, 103–49. On this historical setting of Enoch, see Alexander, “The Historical Setting of the Book of Enoch”; and Greenfield and Stone, “The Enochic Pentateuch and the Date of the Similitudes.” 6. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospel, 1. 7.  On the rationale for Jewish conversion to Christianity in late antiquity, see Botticini and Eckstein, The Chosen Few, 115. 8.  Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism Despite Christianity. 9.  For an example see Levenson, Inheriting Abraham, esp. 173–214. See also Levenson, “How Not to Conduct Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” 10.  Hasidism is, of course, included in courses on modern Jewish history. On the development of Jewish studies in the academy see Schorsch, From Text to Context; Ritter­band and Weschler, Jewish Learning in American Universities; and Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse. 11.  This is not the case for modern Jewish history courses, almost all of which cover Hasidism as part of a section on Jews in Eastern Europe. But in courses on modern Jewish thought this is not the case. One would be hard pressed to find a modern Jewish thought syllabus that included the Baal Shem Tov as well as Samuel Hirsch or Hermann Cohen. One notable study is Martina Urban’s Aesthetics of Renewal. She views Buber’s early work on Hasidism as part of his broader modern Jewish project and shows how he tries to present Hasidism as a modern form of cultural critique. 12.  There are important exceptions to this rule. Perhaps the most important is the work on Hasidism from Joseph Weiss. While he was not particularly interested in the nexus of Judaism and Christianity, he subverted many of the more apologetic renderings of Hasidism that were being written at that time. For example, see his Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism. 13.  It is true that exhibiting the sameness of Judaism and Christianity is itself as kind of new apologetic agenda, but its role is not so much to argue in favor of one or the other or in the superiority of one over the other but rather to complicate old models of

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categorical difference. I want to thank Martin Kavka for helping me with this insight. On this also see Stern, “Rabbinics and Jewish Identity,” 19–21. 14.  Baeck and Schoeps come at Christianity from very different places. Baeck served as a rabbi and Jewish leader most of his life. Schoeps’s education was primarily in Christian institutions. See Lease, “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion, 206–7. On Baeck and Christianity, see Friedlander, Leo Baeck, 61–140. 15.  Perhaps the most overt expression of Wolfson’s constructive theological project can be found in his Open Secret. 16.  His ongoing dialogue with Hans Blüher (1888–1955) was an important moment in Germany in the 1930s and one of the last true attempts to find a place for Jews as the Nazi period began. Their dialogue was published in 1933 as Streit um Israel with Blüher alone listed as author because it became too dangerous to have a Jewish coauthor. See Lease, “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion, 215. 17.  On Schoeps, see Marc Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 43–68; Lease, “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion, 189–231; and Dipple, Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire. In “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion (205) Lease calls Schoeps “one of the most controversial and provocative Jewish thinkers of our century.” 18.  Unlike Buber, however, Schoeps did not write a sustained study of Christianity. 19. Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 125. 20.  For an articulation of this approach, see Levenson, “How Not to Conduct Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” 21.  Alexander Altmann described Schoeps as a “Jewish Barthian student” in his 1935 critique, “Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der dialektischen Theologie.” Altman is more attuned with Schoeps in his later essay, “Theology in Twentieth-Century German Jewry.” See also Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 55–60. 22. Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 4–5. For a similar view see Taubes, “The Issue Between Judaism and Christianity.” 23. Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 8. 24.  For Altmann’s critique see note 21 above. Scholem’s critique can be found in his “Offener Brief an den Verfasser der Schrift: Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit.” 25.  Schoeps, Paul, 150, 153, and 158. See also Hengel, The Son of God, 4–5. See also Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 118, where he argues for the “completely nonJewish” root of the Gospel of John—since proven to be not at all the case—and his claim that Jesus there as the second person of the Godhead is rooted in Egyptian and Syrian mystery cults. See also Schoeps, Paul, esp. 15–50. 26. Schoeps, Paul, 24 and 44. Wyschogrod, another Jewish “Barthian,” makes similar assertions. One example of the polemic agenda in reading rabbinic texts can be seen in Urbach’s The Sages, Their Concepts and Beliefs. For a brief discussion on that see ­Goshen-Gottstein, “Jewish-Christian Relations and Rabbinic Literature,” 21–22. 27. Schoeps, Paul, 280–85. 28.  Here he echoes American rabbis such as Isaac Mayer Wise, who argued similarly in the nineteenth century. 29.  For Schäfer and Boyarin’s position see Chapter 5.

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30. Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 164. 31. Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 77. On Troki, see Lasker, “Jewish AntiChristian Polemics in the Early Modern Period.” It should be noted that Troki also wrote important polemical works against the Rabbinites. See, for example, Golda ­Akhiezer, “The Karaite Isaac ben Abraham of Troki and His Polemics Against Rabbanites.” 32.  It is perhaps not inconsequential that Schoeps came from a Sabbatean lineage. See Schoeps, Ja, nein und trotzdem, 135. 33. Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 93. 34.  See Schoeps, Paul, 284. 35. Schoeps, Jüdische Glauben, 75, cited in Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 61. For Schoeps, biblical revelation is “an essential and cognitive priority over tradition.” See Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 61; and Lease, “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion, 208. Rejection of tradition as a category that holds revelation is one of the main points of criticism Scholem wages against Schoeps. See Scholem, “Offener Brief an den Verfasser der Schrift.” 36. Schoeps, Paul. 103. 37.  For example, see Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 56–57. 38. Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 56–57. 39. Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 105. 40. Haberman, Philosopher of Revelation. See Steinheim, Die Offenbarung nach dem Lehrgegriffe der Synagoge. 41. Steinheim, Die Offenbarung nach dem Lehrbegriffe der Synagoge, 1:11. Also cited in Lease, “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion, 195. 42. Lease “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion, 197, 202, and 204. 43. Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 121. 44.  See, for example, Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 56. 45. Krell, Intersecting Pathways, 155. 46.  See, for example, Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Antisemitism 1870–1914, 170–73; and Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 158–70. 47.  On this see Dohm, On the Civic Improvement of the Jews 1:142, cited in Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion, 17. 48. Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 165–66. 49. Schoeps, Streit um Israel, 62; and Lease, “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion, 217. 50.  See, for example, Schoeps, Jewish Christianity, where he focuses on the extent to which early Jewish Christians influenced later Judaism precisely in the way many, like the Ebonites, rejected the move for Christology. 51.  See Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument, 45. Cohen wrote of the “essence of Judaism” as early as 1904; see his “Die Errichtung von Lehrstühlen fur Ethik und Religionsphilosophie and den jüdischen theologischen Lehranstalten.” Use of the trope “essence” did not originate with Harnack or Baeck. The notion of Judaism having an essence reaches back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, when reformers such as Abraham Geiger used the category of an “essence of Judaism” to defend Judaism against Hegel’s critique. See the discussion in Batnitzky, How Judaism became a Religion, 45–47.

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52.  An important study of the liberal Protestant context of Baeck’s work can be found in Homolka, Jewish Identity in Modern Times. See also Albert Friedlander, Leo Baeck, 103–40. 53.  On some Jewish reactions to Harnack’s essay, see Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 159–69. 54. Friedlander, Leo Baeck, 111 and 267. 55. The 1905 edition was based on an earlier 1901 lecture “Harnack’s Vorlesungen uber das Wesen des Christentums” published in the Montaschrift fur Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (1901): 97–120. There are basically three periods in the trajectory of Baeck’s work. Aside from the two mentioned above is the collection Aus drei Jahrtausended published in 1938 which is viewed as the transition from The Essence to This People. 56.  Baeck, “The Son of Man.” Baeck’s essay was part of a trend among German Jewish intellectuals, who felt they needed to respond strongly to the Protestant devaluations of Judaism in their work on Christianity and the New Testament. Others, including Joseph Eschelbacher and Felix Perles, played prominent roles in this debate. Perles’s 1903 critique of Wilhelm Bousset’s book Religion des Judentum im neutestamentlicher ­Zeitalter (1903) was especially important, much more so than Baeck’s critique of ­Harnack, and in many ways set the agenda for Baeck’s apologetic project. See Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 160–64 and 170–215. 57.  Baeck, “Son of Man,” 34, 37. 58.  Baeck, “Mystery and Commandment,” 173. 59.  On Baeck’s critique of Luther, see Holmolka, Jewish Identity in Modern Times, 76–97. 60.  Baeck, “The Faith of Paul,” in Baeck, Judaism and Christianity, 154. 61.  Baeck, “The Faith of Paul,” 167. 62.  Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 202 and 250. 63. Homolka, Jewish Identity in Modern Times, 108. 64.  See, for example, Batnitzky’s comment about Hermann Cohen in How Judaism Became a Religion, 55 and 58. 65.  Scholem criticized Schoeps for completely ignoring Kabbalah in his Jüdische Glauben. See Scholem, “Offener Brief,” and Biale, Gershom Scholem, 128–29. 66.  Friedlander noted that findings after Baeck’s early work challenged his assumption regarding the lack of romanticism in classical Judaism: “Since Baeck’s writing, the Dead Sea Scrolls and new scholarship have brought to light other traits within the Jewish community at the time of Jesus. These underscore the Jewish aspects of early Christianity, but also place into Jewish thought aspects of what Baeck called ‘romantic religion,’ apocalyptic modes as well as ascetic actions, ways of thinking found in the Gospels which Baeck tended to place outside of Judaism.” Friedlander, Leo Baeck, 115. Ironically, similar traits were being lived by Hasidic Jews in Baeck’s own backyard before and while he was writing “Romantic Religion.” 67.  Altmann, “Leo Baeck and the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” 11. Baeck’s earliest attempt at integrating Jewish mysticism into his theory of Judaism as “ethical monothe-

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ism” can be found in his 1927 essay, “Origin and Beginnings of Jewish Mysticism.” Baeck also published “The Significance of Jewish Mysticism for our Time” in Der Tat in 1923 and “Mysticism within Judaism” in Süddeutsche Monatshefte in 1928. These were both reprinted in Baeck’s Wegen des Judentums, 96–102 and 90–95. 68.  Altmann, “Leo Baeck and the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” 12. 69.  Altmann, “Leo Baeck and the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” 20. This approach, in some sense, removed Judaism from the critique of the romanticism of thinkers like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Benjamin Ritschl, who tried to bring Protestantism back to its Kantian roots. Cohen did so by rejecting mysticism writ large. Baeck argued that mysticism was integral to Judaism but that only Jewish mysticism could live fully with the Kantian imperative. 70.  Altman noted (11) that, according to Baeck, “Jewish mysticism bore certain features that precluded that union [between the human and the divine].” Idel’s work on unio mystica in Kabbalah seriously challenged that assertion. See Idel, Kabbalah, 35–73. It is significant that Baeck ignored the romanticism that also deeply informed the development of Reform Judaism in the nineteenth century. Altmann noted that, “the type of religion Geiger had in mind when advocating a ‘refined’ Judaism owes a great deal to Schleiermacher. [Geiger] describes it in Judaism and its History (1865) as being ‘not a system of truths’ but as a ‘rejoicing’ of the soul conscious of its elevation and, at the same time, the humble confession of its finitude.” See Altmann, Jewish Studies, 88. 71.  See Baeck, “Origin and Beginnings of Jewish Mysticism,” 97. 72.  Baeck, “Origin and Beginnings of Jewish Mysticism,” 98. On the question of Kabbalah and ethics see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond. Wolfson has a very different assessment of Kabbalah’s relation to the ethical, especially regarding the non-Jew. On the Kabbalah and mitzvot see Daniel Matt, “The Mystic and the Mitzvot.” 73.  Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 207. 74. In 1927 Baeck wrote one essay devoted solely to Hasidism entitled “Chassidismus.” As Altmann notes in “Leo Baeck and the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” 19, it was influenced by Buber and thus was not the product of a close reading of original Hasidic sources. 75.  The divine nature of the Jewish soul in Habad doctrine is not dependent on the Jew in question abiding by the law. This is a basic premise of contemporary Habad’s missionary campaign to put lost Jews in touch with their divine souls. 76.  The term “race” may be somewhat anachronistic when applied to premodern sources given that the term as we now use it became operative in the mid- to late nineteenth century. On the centrality of racial essentialism in Jewish mysticism, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 129–85. On race in Christianity, see Buell, Why this New Race. On Baeck’s allegiance to Hermann Cohen, even as he moved into his later period and became more amenable to mysticism, see Friedlander, Leo Baeck, 241. 77.  Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 223 and 239. 78.  On the question of the saint in Protestantism, see Simon Coleman, “Transgressing the Self.” 79.  See, for example, Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 196–206; Wolfson, “Iconic

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Visualization and the Imaginal Body of God; and Wolfson, “Flesh Become Word.” On Daas Torah see Jacob Katz, “Da’at Torah—The Unqualified Authority Claimed for ­Halakhists,” and Lawrence Kaplan, “Daas Torah: A Modern Conception of Rabbinic Authority.” 80.  See Magid, Hasidism on the Margin, 205–48. 81.  Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 221. 82.  Buber, “Symbolic and Sacramental Existence,” 166. 83.  Buber, “Symbolic and Sacramental Existence,” 172. 84.  Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 227. 85. Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, 174. On unity in Buber’s thought see Wolfson, “The Problem of Unity in the Thought of Martin Buber.” On the sacramental notion of the le-shem yihud preface in kabbalistic liturgy, see Hallamish, “Le-Shem Yihud and Its History in Kabbalah and Halakha.” 86.  Altmann showed the extent to which Baeck in his postwar writings tried to integrate mysticism into his prewar framework. Later editions of The Essence of Judaism removed the pejorative comments about mysticism that were very Cohenean. ­Altmann went further to claim that he tried, “as a theologian to integrate the awareness of our mystical tradition—at least some of its strata—into the very fabric of modern Jewish thought.” Altmann, “Leo Baeck and the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” 6. While this is surely true and can be seen more prominently in his This People Israel, it is not apparent how Baeck fundamentally altered his view of “romantic religion” in light of kabbalistic teachings that would fit quite well into his paradigm. 87.  See Wyschogrod, “Why Was and Is the Theology of Karl Barth of Interest to a Jewish Theologian?” See also Held, “The Promise and Peril,” 316–18. More generally see Soloveitchik, “God’s Beloved.” 88.  Wyschogrod, “The Impact of Dialogue with Christianity on My Self-Understanding as a Jew’,” 226. 89.  See Wyschogrod, Body of Faith, xiv: “Maimonides’ demythologization of the concept of God is unbiblical and ultimately dangerous to Jewish faith” (italics added). 90.  Wyschogrod, “Incarnation and God’s Indwelling in Israel,” in Abraham’s Promise, 165. But see Soloveitchik, “God’s Beloved,” 44, where he argues that Wyschogrod sells himself short in making the claim to be exclusively a biblical theologian. Soloveitchik argues that, “The Body of Faith [is] a profoundly rabbinic book.” See also 152 “The physical aspect of Israel’s election, I have argued, is not only a biblical notion. It is, rather, a profoundly rabbinic one as well.” While this may be so to some extent, the rabbinic corpus is replete with an overt tension regarding the corporeality of God, a tension that is not as overt in the Hebrew Bible as in Wyschogrod’s The Body of Faith. While ­Soloveitchik finds that rabbinic teaching conforms with Wyschogrod’s theory, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of other teachings that would refute it. In this sense Wyschogrod may be correct in his self-definition. 91. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 185–86. Wyschogrod uses the term “Orthodox” in an ahistorical way and goes as far as to suggest that “Paul was, after all, an Orthodox Jew.” See his Abraham’s Promise, 234. See also Held, “The Promise and Peril of Jewish Barthianism,” 324.

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92.  See Giller, “Elliot Wolfson and the Study of Kabbalah in the Wake of Scholem”; and Wasserstrom, “Melancholy Jouissance and the Study of Kabbalah.” 93.  Interestingly, Wolfson was a student of Wyschogrod’s wife, Edith Wyschogrod, as an undergraduate at Queens College and has continued to be a close colleague of hers. See Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift. 94.  See Held, “The Promise and Peril of Jewish Barthianism.” See also Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 23, 40, 41, and 69. For a Maimonidean rendering of the modern Jewish project see Seeskin, Maimonides. 95. For another view see Kellner, Maimonides Confrontation with Mysticism, in which he laments the demise of Maimonidean thought in Jewish modernity supplanted by a kabbalistic and Hasidic template. See also Hughes, “Maimonides and the Pre-­Maimonidean Jewish Philosophical Tradition according to Hermann Cohen.” For different readings of Maimonides, see Idel, “Maimonides and Kabbalah,” and Wolfson, “Beneath the Wings of the Great Eagle.” 96. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 83. 97. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 84. See also Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, 40. 98.  See, for example, Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 39 and 92: “It is only in kabbalistic literature that the personalistic and even physical description of God is kept alive.” 99.  Wyschogrod, “A Jewish View of Christianity,” 158–59. 100.  For a discussion of the apologetic nature of the Jewish study of Christianity, see Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 33–59. 101.  Wyschogrod, “A Jewish Perspective on Incarnation,” 197–98. 102.  Wyschogrod, “Incarnation and God’s Indwelling in Israel,” 168. 103.  On the implication of Maimonides’ God and commandments and prayer see Benor, Worship of the Heart. See also Leon Weisteltier’s response to Lévinas’s essay “­Loving the Torah More Than God,” in Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, 89–99. 104. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 55. 105.  For an alternative to Wyschogrod, see Goodman, God of Abraham, in which he makes a detailed argument about the philosophical import of the Hebrew Bible in relation to its monotheistic worldview, arguing in Maimonidean fashion that monotheism is the best philosophical theory human beings have produced. 106.  According to Boyarin, Judaism actually emerged after Christianity. See his “Semantic Differences; Or ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity.’” See also Marc Hirshman, A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity. 107. Wyschogrod, Body of Faith, 40–41, 69. 108. Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, 176. 109. Wyschogrod, Body of Faith, 28. This is the central point of his challenge to the Cardinal of France, Cardinal Lustiger, who was born a Jew and raised in a monastery where his parents put him during World War II. Lustiger claimed that his conversation to Christianity was a fulfillment of his Judaism. Wyschogrod claimed that when Lustiger converted to Christianity his Jewishness was not erased and thus he remained obligated in the mitzvot even though he was now a Christian. See Wyschogrod, “A Letter

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to C ­ ardinal Lustiger,” 206. This biological basis of Judaism also informs Wyschogrod’s position on conversion to Judaism as a “miracle” and why he believes conversion is so discouraged by the rabbinic sages. See Wyschogrod, “Paul, Jews, and Gentiles,” 190–95. 110.  Wyschogrod, “Incarnation and God’s Indwelling in Israel,” in Abraham’s Promise, 175. 111.  Wyschogrod, “Incarnation and God’s Indwelling in Israel,” 178. In fact, he uses that precise locution of degree and not kind in “Why Was and Is the Theology of Karl Barth of Interest to a Jewish Theologian?” 217. On this see Soloveitchik, “God’s Beloved,” 120. 112. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 181. 113. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 178. See also Wyschogrod, “Why Was and Is the Theology of Karl Barth of Interest to a Jewish Theologian?” 217: “As such, the Christian proclamation that God became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is but a development of the basic thrust of the Hebrew Bible, God’s movement toward humankind.” 114.  Wyschogrod, “Why Was and Is the Theology of Karl Barth of Interest to a Jewish Theologian?” 215–16. 115.  Freud’s influence on Wolfson is apparent throughout his work. His utilization of the French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray in his 1996 book, Through a Speculum That Shines, is just one indication among many of this use of Freudean categories. I suggest that at least some of Wolfson’s critics have misread him in part because they are not aware of his Freudianism. 116.  Wolfson, “Textual Flesh, Incarnation, and the Imaginal Body,” 190–91. See also Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,” 246. 117.  For a recent discussion of cultural translation, see Butler, Parting Ways, 1–53 and the discussion of her work in our Introduction. 118. Idel, Ben, 3–10, and our Introduction. See also Goshen-Gottstein, “Judaisms and Incarnational Theologies.” 119.  Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,” 240. 120.  Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,” 247. 121. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 191. 122.  On the impact of the transition from, and resistance to, person to book in Deuteronomy, see Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 196–206. 123. Neusner, The Incarnation of God, 6. 124.  See, for example, where Wolfson refers to the “puzzle of incarnation” as the “comingling of the metaphysical and the physical” endemic to Habad Hasidism in his Open Secret, 89. On the question of embodiment in biblical literature, see Benjamin Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, and in post-biblical Judaism, Bland, The Artless Jew, 59–91. 125.  The dichotomy between the philosophical and mystical world-views that was proposed by Scholem has undergone some important revisions. See, for example, Dauber, Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah, where he argues that “a philosophical ethos” very much affected kabbalistic activity in the Middle Ages and thus philosophers and kabbalists, while taking different hermeneutical and even ideational paths, shared a common ethos that Dauber claims was lacking in classical rabbinism.

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126.  Wolfson, “Iconic Visualization and the Imaginal Body of God,” 149. 127.  See, for example, Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 209. 128. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 230. 129.  Wolfson, “Iconic Visualization and the Imaginal Body of God,” 152. 130.  See, for example, Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,” 242. 131.  Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation,”.253. 132. Neusner, The Incarnation of God, 11. 133. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 192. 134. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 196. 135. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 222. 136. Wolfson, Open Secret, 89. 137.  See Cordovero ‘Or Yakar, Perush ‘al ha-Zohar 2:114–15, and Bracha Zak, BeSha’arei ha-Kabbalah shel R. Moshe Cordovero, 218–19. 138.  Wolfson, “Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah,” 195. 139. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 246. 140. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 249. On gufei torah as commandments, see b.T. Berakhot 63a, b.T. Hagigah 10a, and b.T. Hulin 60b. 141.  See, for example, Shapiro, Megaleh Amukot, #186: the letters of I.S.R.A.E.L. stand for the “600,000 letters in the Torah.” See also Ze‘ev Wolf of Zhitomir, ‘Or ha-Meir, 2:202a. 142. Wolfson, Open Secret, 138. 143. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 256. 144. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 259–60. 145.  It is true that one could say that we are doing nothing more than suggesting that Hasidism reintroduced to Judaism what was once part of it and written out as a reaction to Christianity. In part this may be true, but here we side with Boyarin, who argues in his essay “Semantic Differences; Or ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’” that Judaism as we know it today, as a stable religion, essentially did not exist as such until Christianity created the conditions for the construction of religion. Thus, while incarnational ideas were certainly in play in ancient Israelite society and even served as a central theme in some inter-testamental literature, by the time Judaism emerged in the rabbinic imagination, the notion of incarnation was on the decline. So whether or not these ideas in Hasidism had roots in ancient Israelite society, Hasidism surely did not get them from there. By the time Judaism proper took form in the third or fourth century, these ideas were no longer normative even though, as Peter Schäfer has noted, mention of them may be found in later talmudic texts.

Postscript

1.  Leo Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, cited in Zank, ed. and trans., Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 94. 2. Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism, 286. 3.  For a recent assessment of Kaufmann on the Hebrew Bible, see Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, 165–74.

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4. Seeskin, Jewish Messianic Thoughts in an Age of Despair, 184. 5.  Taubes, “Martin Buber and the Philosophy of History,” 16. 6. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 43. 7.  Arthur Green, “Neo-Hasidism and Our Theological Struggles,” 14. See also Schachter-Shalomi, My Life in Jewish Renewal, 177–88 and 197–98. 8.  See Schwarzschild, “The Lure of Immanence,” in The Pursuit of the Ideal, 61–82. 9.  Writing about a similar paradigm in early twentieth-century Germany, Benjamin Lazier calls this this situation a dichotomy between Gnosticism and pantheism that served as the frame of much of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period. See ­Lazier, God Interrupted, 49–59 and 93–110. 10.  See Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, and Lapide, Israelis, Jews, and Jesus. More generally see Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, esp. 13–60 and 170–205. 11.  The popularity of Hasidism in America is due to those mentioned, among others, and also the missionary activities of Menahem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Grand Rabbi of Habad. Arguably, however, the changing landscape of American religion was also a major factor. See Heelas, The New Age Movement, 15–134; Wuthnow, After Heaven, 1–18 and 142–67; Kyle, The New Age Movement in American Culture, 41–57 and 75–92; Roof, A Generation of Seekers; Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, 12–29; and Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, 95–129. On the impact of Heschel on NeoHasidism, see Green, “Abraham Joshua Heschel.” 12.  An important collection not related to Hasidism or the New Age is Christianity in Jewish Terms. This new open approach to ecumenical dialogue and scholarship has evoked resistance, for example Levenson’s Inheriting Abraham. 13.  Taubes, “The Issue Between Judaism and Christianity,” in From Cult to Culture, 56. 14.  Fishbane’s indebtedness to Buber is explicit. See his The Garments of Torah, 81– 98, and, on the impact of prewar thinkers on him, his Sacred Attunement and “­Ethics and Sacred Attunement.” For a comparison of Fishbane and Buber, see Sam Berrin Shonkoff, “The Two Tablets.” Wolfson’s essay on Buber is “The Problem of Unity in the Thought of Martin Buber.” Wolfson also is indebted to Heschel: see his Alef, Mem, Tau, 54, 204, note 361, and 205, note 3. See also Wolfson, “Suffering Eros and Textual Incarnation.”

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INDEX

Abraham (biblical), 21–22, 25–27, 187n59 Abulafia, Abraham, 86–87, 188–89n11, 190n23, 198n15; kabbalistic teaching, 208– 9n38; on lashon ha-kodesh, 192–93n51; on malkhut, 214n97 Adam (biblical), 19–20, 38, 42–47, 200n49 Adam Kadmon, 101 agape, 60, 71, 78. See also divine love Alkabetz, Shlomo, 25 Altmann, Alexander, 149–50, 227n70, 228n86 anthropomorphism, 163–67 apotheosis, 89, 211n58 Asad, Tal, 174 Asch, Sholom, 114, 217n7 aspaklaria, 91–92 autobiography, 39–40 Baal Shem Tov, 5, 115, 119–24 Badiou, Alain, 31–32 Baeck, Leo, 140, 147–49, 169, 224n14, 226n55; on Hasidism, 227n74; on Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah, 149–50, 226–27n67, 227nn69–70, 227n76; on romanticism and romantic religion, 147–51, 153, 228n86 Barth, Karl and the Barthian position, 142, 144–46, 153–54 Batnitzky, Leora, 160 Bauckham, Richard, 84–85 ben Adam/bar nash, 185n32 Ben Azzai, 23–24 Ben-Gurion, David, 113 Benjamin, Walter, 13 Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism, 5, 161, 179n1, 179n3

Berger, Peter, 174 Berry, Donald, 118 Biale, David, 120 the Bible and biblical Judaism, 153–59, 171 body and soul, 25, 28–30, 57 The Body of Faith, 154–60 Border Lines: The Partition of JudeoChristianity, 48 Bornstein, Avraham, 27 Bornstein, Shmuel, 27; on Jesus, 116–17, 124, 126–29, 131–36, 221n66; on Moses, 28–29; on redemption, 116, 132, 135–36 Borowitz, Eugene, 73–75, 197n2 Boyarin, Daniel, 2–3, 41, 48, 137–39, 196n90, 229n106; on Judaism, 231n145; on logos theology, 36 “Brenner Affair,” 114 Buber, Martin, 16, 31, 72, 140; on autonomy and ethics, 77–78; Christians and Christianity and, 219nn27–28; on gnosticism, 123, 218n20, 220n50; Hasidism and, 53, 117, 119–20, 123, 151–52, 218n21, 223n11; influence of Weber, 189n13; influence on Michael Fishbane, 232n14; on Jesus, 114–18, 123–24, 134–36, 217n13, 217–18n15; on messianism, 121–22; on Paul and the Pauline view, 117, 218n23; on Pharisaism, 217n10; on redemption, 135; Rosenzweig and, 113; on Sabbatai Zevi and Sabbateanism, 120–22; on Spinoza, 120–22; on zaddikism, 220n47. See also I and Thou relationship Butler, Judith, 9–10 carnality, 43–47, 167

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ceremonies and rituals. See sacramentalism charisma and charismatics, 31–33, 188n8, 189n13; undermining of, 42; Weber’s view, 33, 35–37, 44, 48. See also speechact; uniqueness (concept) Christ. See Jesus “Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis,” 122 Christ-event. See charisma and charismatics Christians, Jewish, 48, 196n90 Christians and Christianity, 2, 31–32; affinity with Hasidism, 5–6, 11–12, 29–30, 41, 108–9, 169, 181nn24–25, 187n69, 219n26; ethics, 53–54; relationship to Judaism, 137–40, 145–52, 158, 160–62, 172, 203n83, 223–24n13; theological innovation, 180n7; Wyschogrod’s view, 154, 157–59. See also Christology Christology, 2–3, 83–84, 137, 207n18; intersection with Hasidic zaddikism, 100, 107; kenosis and, 105, 109; Schoeps’s view, 146–47; Wyschogrod’s view, 156–57. See also Christians and Christianity City of God, 51 Clement of Alexandria, 67, 89 Cohen, Hermann, 16, 155, 171 commandments (mitzvot; s. mitzvah), 63–65, 72, 152, 200n46, 200nn48–250. See also halakha comparative analysis, 1, 9, 179n1 conversion and converts, 62, 65–66, 77, 79, 103, 114, 139, 229–30n109 Cordovero, Moses, 87–88, 91–93, 165 corporeality, 22, 156, 186n47. See also divine corporeality counterhistory, 120, 123 covenantal experience and relationship, 36; commandments (mitzvot) and, 72; ethical expression of/universalization of, 62–64, 73, 76–77, 79; the law and, 68 creation, 38–43, 46, 104–5. See also language cross-cultural method, 180n5 cultural translation, 9–10, 161, 182n43 Czernovitz, Hayyim, 23 David (biblical), 87 death, simulations of, 87, 109, 209n41

de Castro, Isaac Orobio. See Orobio de Castro, Isaac Degel Mahaneh Ephraim, 19–21 de Man, Paul, 39–40 Deuteronomic school, 32, 151, 163, 190n32 devotio, 115, 117–19, 122–23 devotional behavior, 8, 69, 73, 209n40 divine absence, 111 divine contraction. See zimzum divine corporeality, 25, 154–59, 166–67 divine embodiment. See embodiment divine/human communication, 63, 200n43 divine/human nexus, 17–30, 54, 57, 184n21, 185nn33–34, 199n30; self-emptying and, 71; view of Dov Baer, 24–25; view of Eastern Orthodoxy, 67–68. See also Nahman of Bratslav; theosis divine/human separation: Christ and, 187n68; transparency of, 38; traversing, 1–3, 15, 25–27, 70–71, 88, 183–84n8, 202n74, 210–11nn56-57; views of Maimonides and kabbalists, 3–4, 90 divine image, 54, 71–72, 162, 185n34. See also imitatio Dei divine immanence. See immanence divine incarnation. See incarnation and incarnationalism divine love, 56–61, 67, 69, 197n11, 201n54. See also agape divine name, 101–2, 198n15 divine unity, 62–66, 79, 155, 200n48 divine will, 23, 32–33, 54, 119 divinized beings, 22–23 Dov Baer (Maggid of Mezritch), 24–25, 193–94n64 Drudgery Divine, 8 dualism, 55–57 Eastern Orthodoxy, 53–54, 57–58, 71; ethics and, 68–69; incarnationalism and, 67–68, 201n53 “Eight Chapters,” 68–69, 85–86 Elijah, 186n47 Elimelech of Lizhensk, 18 embodiment, 2–3, 6–7, 53, 69–70, 156, 197–98n14. See also indwelling of God; Torah

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emptiness. See malkhut (lowest sefirah): kenotic nature; self-emptying Esau/Edom: as reference to Jesus, Christianity, Greeks, or Rome, 116, 126–29, 131, 133, 221n66; as reference to Jews, 221n68 The Essence of Judaism, 147 “essence” trope, 147, 149, 225n51 ethics, Christian, 53–54 ethics, Jewish, 76–78, 80, 204n96; Hasidism and, 67–70, 73; incarnational, 54–56, 61, 201n67; Kabbalah and, 150, 227n72; law and, 68, 70, 73–80, 76; universal, 62–65. See also Levi Isaac of Berdichev; Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk ethics and the ethical, 51, 67–68, 159, 197n2. See also ethics, Jewish Etz Hayyim, 92 Eve, 42–47, 194n67, 195n85 eyn sof, 82–84, 90, 98–99, 101–7, 215n112. See also malkhut (lowest sefirah) “The Faith of Paul,” 148 Fishbane, Michael, 3, 175–76, 202n74, 232n14 form and matter. See matter and form Frank, Jacob and Frankism, 94 Freud, influence of, 162, 230n115 Friedlander, Albert, 147–49 Frommann, Immanuel, 166 gaze, Christian, 4–5, 17, 34, 68, 80, 160, 169, 181n23 Geiger, Abraham, 113–14, 227n70 Gershon Henokh of Radzin, 23 gnosis and gnosticization, 122–23, 135, 218n20, 220n50 God and godliness: contraction of (see zimzum); embodiment in Torah, 2, 4, 20, 70, 162, 166–67; imitation of, 52, 89–90; transcendence of, 154, 156–57. See also under entries beginning with “divine” Gorman, Michael, 84, 89 Greeks, 129–32, 136. See also Hellenism and Hellenistic influence Green, Arthur, 81, 96, 173 Guroian, Vigen, 69

Habad Hasidism, 97, 150, 208–9n38, 227n75. See also Schneerson, Menahem Mendel Haberman, Joshua O., 145 Hadar (king), 105–6 halakha, 62, 68, 70; challenges to, 204– 5n101; ethics and, 67–68, 73–80. See also commandments (mitzvot, s. mitzvah) Hamadan, Joseph, 166 Hanukkah, 127, 129–30, 222n77 Harnack, Adolf, 146–47 Hartman, David, 188n5 Hasidic literature, 15, 18, 116, 199n30. See also Hasidim and Hasidism: exegesis; kenosis and kenotic thinking: Koppel’s view Hasidic masters. See under individual names Hasidim and Hasidism, 13–14, 172, 175–76, 232n11; affinity with Christianity, 5–6, 11–12, 29–30, 41, 108–9, 169, 181nn24–25, 187n69, 219n26; Christian “gaze,” freedom from, 4–5, 17, 34, 68, 80, 160, 169, 181n23; Christianity, knowledge of, 4, 181n22; ethics and, 67–70, 73, 77, 80 (see also ethics, Jewish: incarnational; Levi Isaac of Berdichev); exegesis, 24 (see also Jacob Joseph of Polonye; Nahman of Bratslav); halakha and, 151, 175; incarnationalism and, 4, 25–30, 66–68, 71–72, 77, 160, 203n79; influence of Kabbalah, 107–8, 169; influence of Maimonides/Maimonideanism, 86, 174, 208–9n38; influence on westernized Jews, 12, 160, 173; messianism and, 95–96, 212n80; resistance to text as central, 33, 188n8; role of sacrament, 121, 151–52; romantic aspects, 151; Sabbateanism and, 94, 96, 108; studies of, 138, 223nn11–12; zaddikism and, 15–18, 94–96, 98, 100, 106–8; Zohar and, 9. See also Habad Hasidism; Hasidic literature; the zaddik and zaddikism Hasmoneans, 128 Hebrew language, 42, 102, 192–93n51. See also lashon ha-kodesh Hebrew-language printing and publishing, 193n63

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Hegel, Freidrich, 197n11 Hellenism and Hellenistic influence, 127–28, 131–33, 135–36, 148, 157–58, 201–2n67. See also Greeks Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 140, 232n14 hesed (loving kindness), 26–27 Hess, Moses, 172 hidush (innovation), 36–37, 41 Hillel, 59–60, 63–66, 78 Hizzuk Emunah, 143 houses of study, 41, 48 humility, 85, 87–88, 90. See also Moses I and Thou, 115, 123 I and Thou relationship, 115, 135, 220n53 Ibn Gabbai, Meir, 87 Idel, Moshe, 4–10, 161, 172, 179n1, 179n3, 180n7, 181n20, 208–9n38; on Hebrew, 192–93n51; on nomenclature, 6–7, 161, 189n16, 190n23; on scholarship, 7, 182n43, 190n22; on unio mystica, 227n70; on the zaddik, 96, 190n32, 207n27 imitatio Christi, 52, 89 imitatio Dei, 52, 89–90. See also divine image immanence, 57, 107, 166, 173–74. See also transcendence incarnational theology, 3. See also incarnation and incarnationalism; Nahman of Bratslav incarnation and incarnationalism, 7–8, 15–16, 33–34, 41, 89; Eastern Orthodoxy and, 67–68, 201n53; Hasidism and, 4, 25–30, 66–68, 71–72, 77, 160, 202n77, 203nn79; Jewish ethics and, 52, 54–56, 61, 201n67; Judaism’s view, 2–3, 5, 53, 69–70, 162–63, 180–81n16, 180n13, 202–3nn78; Wolfson’s view, 160–69; Wyschogrod’s view, 137, 158–60, 230n113. See also embodiment; indwelling of God; the soul; the zaddik and zaddikism indwelling of God, 53–54, 58, 203nn79; in humans, 66–68, 70–72, 158–60; in physical space, 70–72, 121, 203nn81. See also embodiment; incarnation and incarnationalism; shekhina Isaac (biblical), 22–23

Jacob and Esau, 127, 133–34, 222n70 Jacob Joseph of Polonye, 21–24, 30, 166, 186nn41–42 Jesus, 48, 53, 113–36, 151; absence from Hasidic literature, 116, 126; Bornstein’s view, 116–17, 124, 126–29, 131–36, 221n66; Buber’s view, 114–18, 123–24, 134–36, 212n13, 217–18n15; comparison with Joseph, 136; comparison with Moses, 114–15; as incarnation of Torah and as revelation, 196n91; in Jewish literature, 125–26; kenosis and, 83–84, 90, 207n19; modern Judaism and, 113–14; Zionists’ view, 114, 175 Jesus of Nazareth: His Life and Times, 114 “Jew” as category, 62–63, 199n41 The Jewish-Christian Argument: A History of Theologies in Conflict, 141–43 The Jewish Gospels, 137 The Jewish Jesus, 137 Jewish mysticism and mystical experience, 1, 179n1, 180n13, 209n40; affinity with Christianity and Christology, 5–6, 175; Baeck and, 149–50, 226–27n67, 227nn69– 70, 228n86; Wolfson and, 154, 162. See also Hasidim and Hasidism; incarnation and incarnationalism; Kabbalah and kabbalists; racial essentialism; Zohar Jewish spirituality, 12–13. See also Hasidim and Hasidism; Jewish mysticism and mystical experience John and Johannine community/creed, 48–49, 196n90 Joseph (as archetypal zaddik), 45, 133–34, 136 Judaism: biblical, 153–59, 171; biological aspects, 158, 229n109; Boyarin’s view, 231n145; conflation with ethics, 75–76, 205n106 (see also ethics, Jewish); Hegel’s view, 197n11; Protestant devaluations of, 147–48, 226n56; Rabbinic, 41, 48–49, 68, 131, 138, 163, 164; relationship to Christianity, 137–40, 145–52, 158, 160–62, 172, 203n83, 223–24n13; Schwarzschild’s view, 174. See also ethics, Jewish; Hasidim and Hasidism; Orthodox Judaism Judaism Despite Christianity, 139

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Kabbalah and kabbalists, 16, 163–64, 168, 230n125; Baeck’s view, 150; Christianity and, 3, 155, 167–68; on divine/human separation, 3–4, 90; ethics and, 150, 227n72; influence on Hasidism, 107–8, 169 (see also the zaddik and zaddikism); Maimonides and, 18; role of sacrament, 152; on unity, 152, 200nn48–49; zaddikism and, 96, 107, 213n85. See also Lurianic Kabbalah Kantian imperative, 51–52 Kaufmann, Yehezkel, 171 Kedushat Levi, 62–66, 199n39 kelippot (s. kelippah), 104, 127, 129, 132–33, 135 Kellner, Menachem Marc, 171–72 kenosis and kenotic thinking, 70–71, 83–84, 89–90, 202n75, 206n16, 207n19, 207n28; Christology and, 105, 109; Koppel’s view, 88, 105–6 (see also Koppel, Ya’akov: on malkhut and the zaddik/messiah); Kristeva’s view, 109–11; as redemptive, 110 keter, 87–88 Klausner, Joseph, 113–14 Kol Ya’akov, 94, 98, 108 Koppel, Ya’akov, 18–19, 82, 93–94, 184n20, 212n74; on kenosis, 88, 108 (see also malkhut [lowest sefirah]: kenotic nature); on Luria and the Lurianic School, 99; on malkhut, 97–110, 214n97; Sabbateanism and, 94, 98–99; on the zaddik/messiah, 100 Kristeva, Julia, 109–11 language, 31, 45; creation and, 36, 38, 46; Eve and, 42–43, 194n67. See also cultural translation; Hebrew language; lashon ha-kodesh; speech; the zaddik and zaddikism Language, Eros, Being, 7, 164 lashon ha-kodesh, 40, 42–44, 47–49 law, 31–32, 68; challenges to, 175, 204–5n101; ethics and, 67–68, 70, 73–74, 76. See also halakha the law-cum-book, 16–17 leadership. See charisma and charismatics; the zaddik and zaddikism Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 52

“Lekha Dodi,” 25 Levene, Nancy, 52 Levi Isaac of Berdichev, 52, 62–65, 76–79. See also Novak, David Lichtenstein, Aaron, 73–74 Liebes, Yehuda, 108, 172, 179n1 Lifshitz, Ya’akov Koppel. See Koppel, Ya’akov Likutei Moharan, 33, 36, 39–40 Limmudei Azilut, 96–97 literature, mystical, 190n23. See also Hasidic literature; Zohar Loew, Judah ben Bezalel (Maharal), 28–29 logos theology, 2–3, 38, 41, 48–49. See also text-based theology love of humanity, 69, 201n54. See also agape; divine love; Hillel “The Lure of Immanence—The Crisis in Contemporary Religious Thought,” 173–76 Luria, Isaac, 91–93 Lurianic Kabbalah, 91, 99–100; cosmic rupture and, 105–6; death, simulations of, 87, 109, 209n41; zaddikism and, 205–6n4 Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov, 24–25 Maggid of Mezritch. See Dov Baer (Maggid of Mezritch) Magnus, Judah, 113 Maimonides, Moses and Maimonideanism, 2, 68–69, 73, 85–86, 169, 171–72; on anthropomorphism, 163, 166; on divine/human separation, 90; influence of, 86, 155–56, 174, 208–9n38; Wyschogrod’s view, 156–57. See also neoMaimonideanism, transcendent Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism, 171–72 malkhut (lowest sefirah), 81–83, 88, 92–93; candle and flame analogy, 214n107; cosmic rupture and, 104–5; creation and, 104–5; Hasidism and, 108; humility and, 87; kenotic nature, 90–91, 98–104; messiah and, 105, 205n3, 213n96; zoharic view, 99–100, 102, 106. See also eyn sof; Koppel, Ya’akov; tehiru; the zaddik and zaddikism; zimzum

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matter and form, 21–24, 186n44 Maximus the Confessor, 56, 211n57 mayin nukvin (female waters), 91 Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, 52, 54–62, 78, 80 Mendelssohn, Moses, 144–45 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 12 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 164–65 messiah personas and messianism, 87–88, 188n5; Hasidism and, 95–96, 212n80; influence of malkhut and kenotic rendering, 105, 107–8, 205n3, 213n96; inverted, 132–33, 135; redemption and, 122. See also Jesus; Sabbatai Zevi and Sabbateanism; the zaddik and zaddikism From Metaphysics to Midrash, 32 mirror, cosmic. See aspaklaria mitzvot (s. mitzvah). See commandments (mitzvot, s. mitzvah) monotheism, 1–3, 34, 84–85, 157, 183n6, 229n105 Mosaism, 147 Moses, 16–18, 32–33, 47, 186n44, 193–94n64; burial place, 32, 188n7; comparison with Jesus, 114–15; divine/human nexus, 28–29; revelation and, 37–38, 40–42, 46; self-emptying of, 90; traversing the divine/human separation, 85–86, 88, 187n65, 208n33. See also humility Moshe Hayyim Ephraim of Sudilkov, 19–22 mystery and commandment, 148–50 mystical union. See unio mystica Nahalat Ya’akov, 94 Nahman of Bratslav, 33–39, 47; charisma and, 39, 188–89nn11-12, 190n32; claims of superiority/divine status/uniqueness, 36–37, 39, 49–50, 188–89nn11–12, 191n34, 191n40; on creation, 38–43, 46; death of and burial place, 188n7, 192n42; heretics and, 195n89; homilies, 38, 41, 43; on revelation, 38–40, 43, 46; role of the zaddik, 33–34, 36, 38–39, 191n41; self-fashioning, 34–35, 37, 40–41, 48; on women, 44–46 Nathan of Gaza, 82, 95, 212–13n83 Nathan of Nemerov, 36

near-death experiences. See death, simulations of neo-Maimonideanism, transcendent, 15–16 Neoplatonism, 55–57 netherworld. See tehiru Neusner, Jacob, 163–64, 202n77 nezah and hod (sefirot), 92 Nirenberg, David, 13 Nittel Nacht, 129–33, 222n77 nomenclature, 1, 4–7, 161–62, 168, 179–80n3, 190n23 non-Jews, 64–65, 200n50 Novak, David, 62, 73, 75–76. See also Levi Isaac of Berdichev ontic affinity, 7–11 orality. See speech Or ha-Meir, 25–26, 187n59 Orobio de Castro, Isaac, 143–44 Orthodox Judaism, 153–54, 228n91 Pannwitz, Rudolph, 122–23 Parting Ways: Judaism and the Critique of Zionism, 9–10 Pascal, Blaise, 51 Paul and Pauline doctrine, 31, 68, 70–71, 146, 148–49, 154; Buber’s view, 218n21; hymn in Phillipians 2, 83–84; sacraments and, 151 Pensées, 51 Pentecost. See Shavuot person-text trajectory, 16–18, 32, 151 Pharisaism, 115, 118–19, 217n10 Phillipians 2 (hymn), 83–85, 108–9 Philo of Alexandria, 204n92 Philosopher of Revelation, 145 Pri ha-Aretz, 54 Protestantism (liberal), 147, 149, 151 purification by defilement, 128–33 Rabbi Akiva, 23–24 rabbis and sages, 125, 162. See also Judaism: Rabbinic racial essentialism, 150, 227n76 rationalism: Aristotelian, 68; commandments and, 75–76; Kabbalah and, 2; Maimonidean, 69, 73, 172

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receptivity, 91 redemption and redemptive process, 108; Bornstein’s view, 116, 132, 135–36; Buber’s view, 135; Hasidism and, 119; Kristeva’s view, 110–11; messianism and, 122; through sin, 95, 212–13n83 Reinharz, Jehuda, 12 Religion of Reason from the Source of Judaism, 171 repentance, 43, 195n89 revelation: commemoration of, 38, 49; kenotic interpretation, 105; Mendelssohn’s view, 144; Nahman’s view, 38–40, 43, 46; overcoming, 47; Schoeps and Steinheim’s view, 144–46, 169, 225n35; as source of Jewish ethics, 204n96 righteousness, autonomous, 59, 199n36 romanticism and “romantic religion,” 147–51, 153, 226n66, 227n70 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 138, 141 Rosenzweig, Franz, 138, 157, 183n6; Buber and, 113; on revelation, 193n52 rupture, cosmic. See shevirat ha-kelim Sabbatai Zevi and Sabbateanism, 81–82, 94–95, 120–22, 212n76 sacramentalism, 121, 151–52 Saint Augustine, 51 Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 31 Sarah (biblical), 21–22 Sarug, Israel, 94, 96–97 Schäfer, Peter, 137–39 Schneerson, Menahem Mendel, 97, 167, 232n11 Schneider, Laurel, 34 Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, 140–43, 169, 224n14, 224n16; on revelation, 144–46, 169, 225n35; Wyschogrod and, 153–54 scholarship, approaches to, 1–2, 9–16, 35, 109, 138–43, 153, 190n22; categorical distinction, 140–46, 152, 158, 163, 174–75; comparative analysis, 1, 9, 179n1; nomenclature and, 162, 179n3, 182n43 Scholem, Gershom, 17, 90–91, 93, 181n20, 211–12n72

Shneur Zalman of Liady, 198n20 Schwarzschild, Steven, 16, 173–74 Seeskin, Kenneth, 16, 172 Sefer Amarim Tanya, 198n20 Sefer ha-Shem, 91–92 Sefer ha-Tanya, 150 sefirot, 81–82, 90–93, 96, 98–106, 213n96, 214n97, 214n104. See also malkhut (lowest sefirah) the self, 55–57 self-emptying, 70–71, 84, 86, 89–90, 207n21 self-fashioning, 34–35, 37, 40–41, 48 Sha’arei Gan Eden, 18, 84, 88, 94, 98–100, 105, 107–8, 206n11 Sha’arei Kedusha, 87–88 Shavuot, 38, 49 shekhina, 90–91, 211–12n72. See also indwelling of God; malkhut (lowest sefirah) Shem me-Shmuel, 27, 116 shevirat ha-kelim, 83, 95, 98, 103–4, 106 Shimon bar Yohai, 94–95, 188n8 Sidduro shel Shabbat, 23 Sifra de-Zniuta, 38, 43 similitude, 10–11. See also ontic affinity Sinai experience. See covenantal experience and relationship Smith, Jonathan Z., 7–8, 37, 197n4 Society of Jewish Ethics, 196n1 Song of Songs, 110 “Son of Man” and “son of man” concept, 148 sonship, 6, 183n2. See also Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism the soul, 21–22, 56–58, 87–88, 150, 209– 10n43, 227n75. See also body and soul speech, 28–29, 40, 192n50 speech-act, 33, 38, 41, 44, 48–49. See also the zaddik and zaddikism Spinoza, Baruch, 113–14, 120–22 “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Baal Shem,” 120 spirituality and spiritual renaissance, 12. See also Jewish mysticism and mystical experience The Star of Redemption, 141, 157 Steinheim, Salomon Ludwig, 145 Strauss, Leo, 171–72

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suffering servant, 84, 135. See also self-emptying sui generis. See Nahman of Bratslav: claims of superiority/divine status/uniqueness supererogation, 73–74 synergy. See divine will targum. See translation Taubes, Jacob, 175 tehiru, 82, 206n13, 215n113 terminology. See nomenclature tetragrammaton. See divine name text-based theology, 32, 188n5. See also logos theology texts, interpretation of, 181n20 textual embodiment, 36. See also Torah Theologico-Political Treatise, 114 theology. See incarnational theology; logos theology; text-based theology theosis, 19–20, 67–68, 85, 88–90, 201n53, 201n55. See also divine/human nexus This Incredible Need to Believe, 109 This People Israel, 147–48 tiferet, 91–93 Tikkunei Zohar, 92 Tishby, Isaiah, 82, 94 Toldot Yaakov Yosef, 21–22 Toldot Yeshu, 113, 124–25 Torah, 18–21, 130–31; celebration and study of, 38, 49, 129, 131–32, 135; divine origin of, 48, 63; God’s embodiment in, 2, 4, 20, 70, 162, 166–67; healing power of, 20–21. See also the law-cum-book transcendence, 57, 156–57, 173–74 translation, 9–10, 43, 45–48, 194n67 transposability, 10 Troki, Isaac, 143–44, 225n31 Two Types of Faith, 115, 118–20, 217n11 unio mystica, 208n38, 227n70. See also incarnational theology uniqueness (concept), 37, 39, 65. See also charisma and charismatics unity, 152; of corporeal and the divine (see divine/human nexus); of God, 79 (see also divine unity); of human community, 63–66; of Jewish people, 200n49;

view of Kabbalah and kabbalists, 152, 200nn48–49 universalism, 31, 62–65, 75–76. See also unity: of human community Vital, Hayyim, 87–88 Weber, Max, 33–37, 44, 48 Weiss, Joseph, 183–84n8 What Is Christianity?, 146–47 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 118 Wolff, Joseph, 5 Wolfson, Elliot, 15, 175, 192–93n51, 208–9n38, 208n35, 210–11n56; on Abulafia, 214n97; on classical Judaism, 163–64; contribution to scholarship, 140–41, 153–56; on divine corporeality, 166–67; on feminine aspect of God, 93; on humility, 85; on incarnation and indwelling, 7–9, 70, 160–69; influence of Freud, 162, 230n115; influence of Heschel, 232n14; on Jewish mysticism and mystics, 154, 162, 168, 179n1, 185n32, 227n72; on mystical experience and mystical union, 88, 110; on nomenclature, 161–62; on relationship of Judaism and Christianity, 169; on scholarship, 190n22; on the secret in messianism, 111, 216n139; Wyschogrod and, 153, 163 Wolfson, Elliot Harry Austryn, 137 the word/Word. See logos theology “world of garments,” 101, 214n105 worship. See devotional behavior Wyschogrod, Michael, 69–70, 140, 153–60, 203nn79, 228n90; on Buber, 155–56; on Christianity, 154, 157–59; conflation of Judaism and ethics, 205n106; on divine corporeality, 154–59; on incarnation and incarnationalism, 137, 158–60, 230n113; on relationship of Judaism and Christianity, 156, 158, 169 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 158 yesod, 81, 96–97, 104, 106–7, 213n96, 215n120 the zaddik and zaddikism, 33–35, 183–84n8, 183n2, 190n32, 193n54, 205n2; Buber’s view, 220n47; Hasidism and, 15–18, 24,

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81, 94–96, 98, 100, 106–8; influence of Weberian category of charisma, 189n13; as intermediary, 198n17; Kabbalah and, 96, 107, 213n85; kenotic dimension, 83, 98, 105–6; language and speech of, 40–43, 45, 47–49 (see also speech-act); malkhut and, 83, 97–98, 100, 104–5; messianic figure and, 81–85, 95, 97, 108–9, 205–6n4; as nexus between the divine and human, 53, 207n27; as nexus of logos and incarnational theology, 47–49; as resistance to text in favor of person, 33, 188n8; as yesod (foundation of the

world), 81, 96, 107, 213n85; in the Zohar, 15, 94–95, 97. See also charisma and charismatics; Nahman of Bratslav Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, 25–26, 187n59 zimzum, 103–4, 194n74, 206n13 Zionism and Zionists, 114, 117, 175, 218n23 Zohar, 19, 130, 171; Christianity and, 4, 8–9; Hasidism and, 9; language and, 44; on malkhut, 82–83, 90–93, 99–100 (see also Koppel, Ya’akov); on the soul, 209–10n43; on text as body, 166, 168; on the zaddik, 15, 94–95, 97. See also Sifra de-Zniuta; Tikkunei Zohar

encountering traditions

Ted A. Smith, Divine Violence: John Brown and the Limits of Ethics David Decosimo, Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue Francis X. Clooney, SJ, His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence Muhammad Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam