The compiler of the Yalkut Shim’oni collected in the thirteenth century the old Aggadahs which, as preserved by the Midrashic literature, accompanied the biblical text. In the Yalkut Reubeni, on the other hand, we have a collection of the Aggadic output of the Kabbalists during five centuries.

To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence.

The more genuinely and characteristically Jewish an idea or doctrine is, the more deliberately unsystematic is it.

“for it is wholly in thee and thou art wholly in it.”

The finite word of man is aimed at the infinite word of God.

To a certain extent, therefore, mysticism signifies a revival of mythical thought, although the difference must not be overlooked between the unity which is there before there is duality, and the unity that has to be won back in a new upsurge of the religious consciousness.

As the idea is finally developed by the outstanding representatives of the new school, God is not so much the master of the universe as its first principle and prime mover.

said:6 “There are those who serve God with their human intellect, and others whose gaze is fixed on Nothing.… He who is granted this supreme experience loses the reality of his intellect, but when he returns from such contemplation to the intellect, he finds it full of divine and inflowing splendor.”

The “Midrash on the Creation of the Child” relates that after its guardian angel has given it a fillip upon the nose, the newborn child forgets all the infinite knowledge acquired before its birth in the celestial houses of learning. But why, Eleazar asks, does the child forget? “Because, if it did not forget, the course of this world would drive i