Mysticism as Resistance

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The three papers in this panel explore the use of texts defined in some sense as mystical that resist a dominant theological or religious paradigm. The panel begins with the foundational Zohar, which Jay McCrensky argues should be read as subverting traditional rabbinic exegesis. David Halperin offers a reading of “I Came This Day to the Spring” (Va-Avo Ha-Yom El Ha-'Ayin), a text considered heretical in its day and attributed to R. Jonathan Eibeschuetz, as a program for a new religion inspired by both Judaism and Christianity but transcending both. Iris Malkah Morrell argues that evocations of God by avowedly atheist Yiddish writers should be read within the kabbalistic paradigm of revelation and concealment and so should be understood as joining traditional theological discourse but from a place of protest.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Mysticism

Chair

• Jeffrey Amshalem, Independant Scholar

Individual Presentations

• The Surreptitiously Subversive Zohar - The Case of Moses - Jay McCrensky, Contemporary Kabbalah Institute

• Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz and Moravian Christianity - David Halperin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• “A New Tabernacle in the Middle of the Market”: Irreverent Theology in Atheist Yiddish Poetry of Atrocity - IRIS MALKAH MORRELL, University of California, Irvine

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 03