Sublime

the shift in the authority of Torah from corrosive coercion imposed to an offer of a wisdom that bubbles up, the Torah attracts attention and elicits observance because it is wise and beautiful and because it augments life.

Philosophically, modernity is often referred to as “The Age of Man.” In ascension since the Renaissance, it crystallized toward the end of the 18th century into a configuration of knowledge that French philosopher Michel Foucault characterized as an episteme in which the figure of Man as the foundation of all possible knowledge. Jamaican philosophe

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

Rawls and Heidi simply assume that there is some “unencumbered self,” as political philosopher Michael Sandel puts it,2 independent of and prior to the affiliations that constitute my identity, and that we can somehow imagine the preferences of these unencumbered selves as they organize themselves politically. But, in fact, we only have preferences

the power of Judaism is clear to those truly engaged in its complex struggles and searchings for truth and divinity. Instead of focusing on new ideas, the Jewish community would be better served by connecting to the original “big ideas” of our heritage: Torah, avodah, and gemilut hasadim,

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

The negativity that doubly binds God and world yields what we may also call acosmic naturalism. The adjective acosmic connotes that there is no world that is not enfolded in the essence that is the light of the Infinite, whereas the noun naturalism indicates that there is no unfolding without the enfolded, no manifestation but in the occlusion that