Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [99]
Chapter 3. Torah
1. See my article “The Zaddik as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45:3 (1977): 327-347, as well as discussion by Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), pp. 189-207, and Ada Rapoport-Albert, “God and the Zaddik as the Two Focal Points of Hasidic Worship,” History of Religions 18 (1979): 296-325.
2. This is my point of disagreement with such a work as Adin Steinsaltz's The Thirteen-Petaled Rose (New York: Basic Books, 1985), a marvelous modernizing of language that leaves the essential faith claims of classical Kabbalah unchallenged.
3. Here we see how very deep is the gap between my views and those of certain claimants to the mantle of Kabbalist in our day.
4. This sort of meditation on letters has ancient roots in Kabbalah and was much practiced in early Hasidism. Moshe Idel is the expert in this stream within Kabbalah, beginning with Abraham Abulafia in the thirteenth century, though based on even earlier roots evidenced in Sefer Yezirah (perhaps second or third century, in its earliest form) and Otiyyot de-Rabbi Akiva (eighth or ninth century). For the continuation of this tradition into Hasidism, see Idel, Hasidism, pp. 103ff. While it can easily be trivialized and hence mocked, it is a real part of the Kabbalistic legacy and was long considered one of its more esoteric tools.
5. Midrash Ekhah Rabbah 2:17.
6. Avot
7. The broadening vision is based on the rabbis’ claim eyn hokhmah ela’ Torah (Midrash Tanhuma va-yelekh 2). Literally: “There is no wisdom but Torah.” The statement originally indicates that the term “wisdom,” when appearing in Scripture, must refer to Torah. This statement and others following it (“There is nothing that is not hinted at in Torah” [Zohar 3:231a]) have been read both as calls for widening the scope of Torah and for limiting the definition of what “wisdom” one may legitimately pursue. Today it should best be used to broaden our notion of Torah. The “narrowing” means that Torah, “wider than the sea,” concentrates itself so that it may all be present in the single letter or on the two tablets, just as shekhinah, which “fills the whole world” can also be concentrated between the two staves of the Ark.
8. T. B. Berakhot 11b. The daily study of Torah, a religious obligation, is to be preceded by a blessing. See the daily prayer book, preceding birkot hashahar (the early morning blessings).
9. T. B. Sanhedrin 32a.
10. I do recognize the size of this “if.” But it is essential. It needs to stand up against centuries of habit in which the progressive narrowing of legal options, due to increasing bodies of precedent, tended to influence and hence to narrow nonlegal aspects of the tradition as well, especially once the battle of Orthodoxy versus modernity was joined. This open-ended view of Torah and revelation is carried to an extreme in early Hasidism, where it is insisted that each generation has both a right and an obligation to reinterpret Torah according to its own needs and unique spirit. See the sources I quote in “Hasidism and Its Changing History,” included in a special Hasidism issue of Jewish History, forthcoming. In the Hasidic discussion, this obligation to reinterpret was hardly used in the halakhic domain, where Hasidism remained quite conservative. But its strong voice within the sources is a major factor in the link I see between Hasidism and a contemporary radical renewal of Judaism.
11. T. B. Baba Batra 15a; Sifre Devarim 357; and see discussion by A. J. Heschel, Heavenly Torah: Refracted through the Generations, ed. Gordon Tucker and Leonard Levin (New York: Continuum, 2005). Here, as in much of this section, my thinking has been shaped by many years of reading