Sublime

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

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.

In the first instance, the dispersion of Moses in every generation (itpashṭuta de-moshe be-khol dara we-dara) signifies the capability of every Jew to expand his or her consciousness (da‘at) to the point of being assimilated within the divine and to draw down the infinite light into the world.42 However, the righteous sages, the “eyes of the congre

The sixth Rebbe deduced from this principle that Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), the Ba‘al Shem Ṭov, “master of a good name,” generally abbreviated as the Beshṭ, should be considered the “Moses of Ḥasidism” and Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the “Moses of Ḥabad.”

Just as Jung equates the “inner experience of individuation” with what the mystics name “the experience of God”—the “smallest power” confronting the “greatest power,” the “smallest space” containing the “infinite”—so we can think of Schneerson becoming an “in-dividual,” that is, a “separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole,’”89 the individuated point t

The lack of any chronological order in the sefirotic pleroma—in the language of Sefer Yeṣirah, which is frequently cited by kabbalists, “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end like a flame bound to the coal”115—is the ontological underpinning of the inability to impose a linear template onto the scriptural narrative.

Darkly it stood in their path, the ally of forces and tendencies in whose rejection pride was taken by a Jewry which, in Steinschneider’s words, regarded it as its chief task to make a decent exit from the world.

the error of assuming that kabbalah and Ḥasidism are “one entity expressed in different forms.” In an effort to correct this miscalculation, he explained that the former is the study of esoteric matters by a limited group of people, the elect (yeḥidei segullah) of a given generation, whereas the latter is about publicizing these secrets to afford e