Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [96]
19. T. B. Berakhot 34b.
20. On the widespread and varied use of the royal metaphor in rabbinic literature, see David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
21. See Tsava'at RiYVaSH 18a, as quoted by Arthur Green and Barry W. Holtz in Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1977), p. 81.
22. See the rabbinic readings of Gen. 25:27.
23. See the treatment of this classical theme, as well as its later adaptations, in Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father's Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
24. T. B. Baba Metsi'a 59b.
25. T. B. Shabbat 67a. The actual quote reads “sons of kings” or “royal children.” I translate the phrase as it is later understood in the tradition. Cf. the statement by the Hasidic master R. Aaron of Karlin: “The greatest ‘evil urge’ is that the son of a king forget that he is a king's son.”
26. This is perhaps given its boldest expression in the Kabbalists’ hymn Lekha Dodi, by Shlomo Alkabetz of Safed, where God is uniquely addressed as “my Beloved.” See my further discussion in “Some Aspects of Qabbalat Shabbat,” in Sabbath: Idea, History, Reality, ed. Gerald J. Blidstein (Beersheva: Ben Gurion University, 2005), as well as the full-length treatment by Reuven Kimelman, Lekha Dodi ve-Qabbalat Shabbat: ha-Mashma'ut ha-Mistit (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2003).
27. Mishnah Yadayim 3:5. See my discussions of Midrash Shir ha-Shirim in “The Song of Songs in Early Jewish Mysticism,” Orim: A Jewish Journal at Yale 2:2 (1987): 49-63, and “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs,” A$$S Review 46:1 (2003): 1-52.
28. The phrase originates with Daniel Boyarin in “The Song of Songs, Lock or Key: The Song of Songs as a Mashal,” in his Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 105-116. The notion of “washing over,” however, has deeper Jewish roots. See R. Aaron of Karlin, Bet Aharon (Brody 1875) 144a, who reads the Zoharic phrase bey ana rahets as “In im kon ikh mikh ibervashn!”
29. One important early Kabbalistic reading of the Song of Songs is available in English, translated by my late student Seth Brody. See Ezra ben Solomon of Gerona, Commentary to the Song of Songs and Other Kabbalistic Commentaries (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University [Medieval Institute Publications], 1999).
30. For an introductory treatment, see my Guide to the Zohar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). This book was issued in conjunction with a new English translation of the Zohar with commentary by Daniel Matt. Zohar: The Pritzker Edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004-) will span twelve volumes and is scheduled for completion in 2015.
31. On this point see especially the discussion in my “Shekinah,” supra, n. 27.
32. “Father” and “King” were especially one, we might add, if your thinking developed in turn-of-the-century Vienna, the capital ruled by Franz Josef, the most “fatherly” of all European monarchs.
33. Mekhilta shirta 3 (ed. Horowitz-Rabin, Jerusalem: Bamberger and Wahrman, 1960), p. 126.
34. Nowhere is this dual focus better seen than in the writings of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c. 1020-c. 1057), author in Arabic of the highly abstract Meqor Hayyim (Fons Vitae) and of impassioned Hebrew verse frequently addressing God as Lover (often absent Lover) of Israel.
35. Simon Rawidowicz, “Saadya's Purification of the Idea of God,” in Saadya Studies, ed. E. I. J. Rosenthal (Manchester, 1943), pp. 139-165.
36. But see José Faur's Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (Syracuse: Syracuse