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Mystical Poetics: The Jewish Mystical Text as LiteratureAuthor(s): Don Seeman and Shaul MagidSource: Prooftexts, Vol. 29, No. 3, Special Issue: The Jewish Mystical Text as Literature (Fall2009), pp. 317-323Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/PFT.2009.29.3.317 .
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PROOFTEXTS 29 (2009): 317–323. Copyright © 2009 by Prooftexts Ltd.
Mystical Poetics:The Jewish Mystical Text as Literature
D O N S E E M A N A N D S H A U L M A G I D
A b S t r A c t
Despite the explosion of interest in Jewish mysticism in recent decades, scholars have only recently begun to explore in any depth how mystical texts function as literature. This includes not just literary readings of Jewish mystical texts, but also extends to questions of mystical and literary efficacy. In other words, what kinds of strategies are employed in Jewish mystical writing to convey mystical content and ethos, to shape religious subjectivity in distinctive ways, or even to influence the cosmos through specialized acts of writing and reading (i.e., producing and consuming literature)? Moreover, how do these literary and mystical projects intersect, reinforce, and possibly even place limits upon one another in different textual settings? Finally, how might consideration of these topics change the way we think about Jewish literary studies more broadly?
This special section of Prooftexts began as a panel at the Toronto meeting
of the Association for Jewish Studies in 2007. We hoped to raise a set of
questions related to the ways in which Jewish mystical texts function as
literature, as well as the ways in which Jewish mystical writers “do things with
words.” These are closely related projects, though they are by no means identical.
The former is largely a question about how (and to what extent) models that have
been developed for the study of literature might be applied to the specialized texts
of Jewish mysticism; the latter asks, in addition, how literary and other features of
such texts relate to culture and the phenomenology of religion through themes
such as ritual efficacy or theodicy. Together, these two sets of questions begin to
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318 y Don Seeman and Shaul Magid
PROOFTEXTS 29: 3
tell us something about the complex nature of Jewish mystical writing and its place
within broader currents of Jewish literature.
No comprehensive study of Jewish literary history can avoid sustained engage-
ment with mystical texts and practices. Though sometimes treated as marginal to
Jewish literary studies, we want to emphasize that practically every Jewish cultural
and linguistic setting has given rise to some form of mystical consciousness and
writing, from the Sufi-inflected mysticism of Maimonides’ descendants in Egypt to
the flowering of Hasidism among East European Jews before World War II. Points
of contact and strong forms of continuity characterize the relationship between
many of these different mystical expressions, but so do complicated discontinuities,
religious debates, and cultural disconnects. The contemporary academic study of
Jewish mysticism encompasses not just medieval and early modern Kabbalah in all
its varieties, but also the “pre-Kabbalistic” writing of late Antiquity, the esoteric and
still imperfectly known world of Hasidei Ashkenaz, and—increasingly—the rela-
tionship between classical mystical themes and modern Jewish (and/or Israeli) litera-
ture that is avowedly secular in nature. This breadth of literary fields calls for better
collaboration among scholars of religion, Jewish Studies, and literature as well as
other fields such as history, anthropology, or hermeneutics.
Despite the wealth of contemporary publications in this area, it is well to
remember that sustained academic research on Jewish mysticism is still of rela-
tively recent provenance. The earliest representatives of what came to be known as
academic Jewish Studies, propelled in no small measure by the complex identity
politics of their own day, treated only “rational” forms of Judaism as valid subjects
of inquiry. Jewish philosophy was valorized, Jewish mysticism neglected or belit-
tled. Pushing hard against this bias and constrained by the lack of established
interpretive matrices, early researchers in the field focused by necessity on the
painstaking labor of collection, categorization, and production of critical editions,
along with careful historical-philological studies of authorship, classification, and
identification of intellectual trajectories. Such work is obviously both vital and
ongoing, but it has more recently been enriched by powerful new emphases on
social history, hermeneutics, gender studies, literary criticism, and the phenome-
nology of religion. Our decision to frame this issue around the question of what
we have called “mystical poetics” was partly in recognition of this burgeoning and
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Mystical Poetics: The Jewish Mystical Text as Literature y 319
Fall 2009
interdisciplinary new scholarship. Viewing mystical texts as both aesthetic and
cultural/religious artifacts forces a reader to question the text’s literary form (e.g.,
discursive, narrative, or poetic) as well as its performative dimension as it constructs,
describes, or enacts the cosmos through exegetical and other techniques. Poetics
are in one sense broader than literary studies, because they accommodate an
interest in how meaning itself has been constructed, conveyed, or transcended in
different literary and cultural settings, and how the texts we study help to consti-
tute the social world that informs them.
Another way to say this might be that our project is premised upon the recog-
nition that while mystical texts may certainly be read as literature, their literary
shape is always defined at least in part by the kinds of “work” they are asked by
writers and readers to do in some particular set of cultural and historical contexts.
This does not mean that literature can or should be reduced to secondary catego-
ries derived from anthropology, history, or comparative religion. On the contrary,
we believe that while attention to the multiple forms of efficacy that are sought in
the writing and reading of mystical texts cannot be ignored, such efficacy is also
conditioned by distinctive literary properties such as narrative or genre that make
mystical literature broadly comparable to the literature investigated by scholars in
other fields. Exploring this nexus between text and context may sometimes require
that we juxtapose familiar literary categories such as myth, symbol, poetry, or
fiction with specialized categories derived from the study of religion such as
theurgy, ritual, magic, or anthropopathy (the parallel between human and divine
emotion). Yet it should be clear that the three selections published here reflect no
single research methodology, and put forward a range of different, possibly incom-
mensurable questions.
In literary terms, Eitan Fishbane’s contribution, “The Scent of the Rose,”
constitutes an especially rich example of traditional concerns with plot, genre, and
narrative form, though he uses these concerns to develop a highly original approach
to the deep structure of the zoharic text. The Zohar, or “Book of Splendor,” is
undoubtedly the most highly researched of any single Jewish mystical text. Aside
from its intrinsic or canonical significance to the history of Jewish religious litera-
ture—it is treated as a revelation almost on a par with Scripture in many tradi-
tional communities—the Zohar has also dominated the literary study of Jewish
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320 y Don Seeman and Shaul Magid
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mystical literature because of its strong narrative composition, which invites
literary analysis. Loosely based on the chapter-by-chapter exegesis of biblical texts,
the Zohar is also structured by its pseudopigraphic account of Rabbi Shimon Bar
Yochai and his students. While an earlier generation of scholars focused on
linguistic and historical dimensions of the text, Fishbane reminds us that reflexive
fictionality and story-telling strongly distinguish the zoharic corpus from much of
the kabbalistic literature that preceded it, rendering “the narrated adventures of R.
Shimon bar Yoÿai and his disciples . . . integral to the heart of the text.”
Representing the Zohar as a work of “fictional imagination” raises interpretive
possibilities as well as problems for Zohar scholarship. How should we think about
the “reality status” of an ostensibly fictional text that represents itself as sacred history,
thus destroying for many readers the “shared presumption of fictionality and inven-
tion” that characterize standard forms of Western secular literature? Fishbane argues
that this text should be read as a kind of “dramatic literature, a narrative world in
which the power of esoteric wisdom and the brilliance of its disclosure are presented
and “theatricalized”—performed and enacted—for the reader, through techniques of
narrative focalization, composition, and dialogue between characters. Fishbane
demonstrates scholarly concern for the medieval Castilian historical and literary
context of the Zohar, but does not stop there, because one of the most innovative
aspects of his analysis is to demonstrate how these localized literary topoi may also
help to stimulate the emergence of Jewish mystical consciousness among later
readers.
Fishbane shows, for example, that intense emotional exclamations by the
Zohar’s Rabbi Shimon frequently segue into exegetical passages that reveal
mystical “secrets” to the devoted student of the text. These emotive passages thus
help to undergird some of the text’s more radical claims about the continuity
between God and mystical teacher. Seemingly arbitrary “encounter” narratives
involving Rabbi Shimon and his disciples, similarly, enact the Zohar’s implicit
metaphysical claim that the workings of the divine may be discerned in the
happenings of the mundane realm. Far from splitting the aesthetic (“literary”)
elements of textuality from their corresponding religious or mystical-experiential
dimensions, therefore, Fishbane’s close reading of zoharic narrative points to the
ways in which mystical poetics underwrite—and are really inseparable from—
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Mystical Poetics: The Jewish Mystical Text as Literature y 321
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those cultural and religious projects that define the Zohar’s reception within
Jewish mystical tradition. He shows, in other words, how a careful literary reading
contributes to a better grasp of the conceptual and experiential phenomenology of
Jewish mysticism.
Shaul Magid’s contribution, “Lurianic Kabbalah and Its Literary Form,”
builds on a similar commitment to understanding the ways in which literature
shapes (and is shaped by) religious culture and experience, though his topic is the
far less exhaustively researched corpus of Lurianic Kabbalah. Mostly composed
during a brief but intense window of religious and literary creativity in sixteenth-
century Safed, the literary corpus identified with Luria and his followers quickly
became the most authoritative prism through which later practitioners would come
to view the whole Jewish mystical tradition. Yet because of their highly specialized
language and unique mythic construction, these texts can also seem opaque to
scholars who are used to reading other kinds of rabbinic and mystical texts. Luri-
anic Kabbalah tends to have a much more remote relationship to biblical-exegetical
concerns than Midrash or even Zohar, and Magid shows that this is further
complicated by Lurianic insistence that the mystics of sixteenth-century Safed
were themselves embodiments (through complex transmigrational schemes) of
both zoharic and biblical heroes—heroes who are themselves thought of as enact-
ments of the dynamic features of unfolding divinity. This overdetermined layering
of literary codes turns Lurianic texts into rich repositories of complex symbolism,
but also tends to destroy the semantic integrity of narrative upon which most
forms of literary analysis rely.
Magid’s reading works to extend mystical poetics to texts that have so far received
relatively little interest from literary scholars. But he also grapples with the construc-
tive theological opportunities made possible by this style of analysis. Pulled between
the claims of traditional religious scholars for whom the Lurianic corpus is literally
sacred and the relentlessly historicizing gaze of most academic scholarship, Magid
argues that contemporary Jews who stand outside the worldview and truth claims of
Luria’s Kabbalah may nevertheless participate in an authentic and generative rela-
tionship with this corpus precisely on the grounds of its strong “fictional” qualities.
Fiction, he argues, can be truthful without being factual, because it involves a willing
suspension of disbelief that never actually substitutes the “play” of forms for external
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322 y Don Seeman and Shaul Magid
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reality. Magid’s approach may be controversial both among traditionalists who do not
concede the “fictional” nature of the Lurianic project as well as many academics who
dispute the use of literary and historical research for constructivist theological (i.e.,
religious) purposes, but Magid’s argument also has analytic consequences that should
not be ignored. His reading calls attention to the complicated relationship between
literary practice and cultural context through which texts are received by actual
communities of readers, and insists that this is fundamental to any conversation about
what and how texts come to be thought of as bearing meaning. Perhaps even more
than other forms of Jewish literature, the poetics of Jewish mystical writing will
require scholars to break down today’s artificially high walls between literary, histor-
ical, and social scientific approaches to the study of these texts.
This theme has been taken up in explicit terms by Don Seeman’s essay, “Apos-
tasy, Grief, and Literary Practice in Habad Hasidism.” Seeman’s anthropologically
inflected analysis of an 1827 tract by Rabbi Dov Ber of Lubavitch requires him to
locate this text clearly within its immediate context of chaos and grief surrounding
Tsar Nicholas’s determination to “Russify” Russian Jews by drafting children as
young as eight or nine (and often younger) into brutal and open-ended military
service. But Seeman argues that there is also a more intensely personal context to
this essay, in the Rebbe’s unresolved grief over the apostasy of his own brother seven
years before. Seeking to avoid the potential reductivism of cultural and psycholog-
ical approaches to literary texts, Seeman nevertheless argues that proper under-
standing of a tract such as this one requires a careful appreciation for the varied
forms of ritual and textual efficacy that underlie literary practice in East European
Hasidism. A text like R. Dov Ber’s is clearly meant to communicate mystical ideas
and concepts to his readers, but it also serves as a direct conduit for redemptive
divine power and cosmic realignment. The anthropopathic nature of Hasidic
theology furthermore posits a close connection between cosmic structure and the
structure of subjective emotional states, such as grief, longing, or ecstasy, which are
themselves evoked and shaped through literary practice.
R. Dov Ber’s technical and densely argued essay is in many ways a counterintui-
tive example of Hasidic literature for poetic analysis, but Seeman argues that such
theoretical tracts must take their place alongside the colorful stories and homiletics
that have already been investigated by scholars with literary interests. Like the Luri-
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Mystical Poetics: The Jewish Mystical Text as Literature y 323
Fall 2009
anic corpus upon which it draws so heavily, these texts expand our understanding of
what constitutes Jewish literature in at least two ways. They force us to grapple with
texts whose form is not primarily narrative, and they call our attention to the complex
continuum that exists between the literary-aesthetic and the ritual-emotive poles of
mystical writing. This may be only one specialized case of the attention that must be
shown to apparently non-discursive dimensions of poetry, fiction, and other more
traditional literary genres, but the widespread attempt to read Hasidic texts primarily
for conceptual content—as models of mystical thought or philosophy—has helped to
obscure the work they do at an aesthetic level in shaping the religious ethos and
forms of subjectivity.
The three essays included in this special section are arranged chronologically to
reflect three of the major developmental cruxes in Jewish mystical creativity, from
Zohar to Luria to East European Hasidism. Such continuities as may be discernible
between these schools are certainly also accompanied by many innovations, ruptures,
and ongoing disputes about doctrinal, ritual, and literary features of mystical life.
We certainly cannot claim to have done justice in this issue to the diversity of Jewish
mystical and literary traditions, or to the breadth and depth of contemporary schol-
arship that spans periods, disciplines, and theoretical orientations. In particular, we
want to call attention to important recent work on Middle Eastern Jewish mysti-
cism, Neo-Hasidism, and contemporary Kabbalah that ought to be part of this
conversation, as well as the burgeoning conversation in Israel on the relationship
between modern Hebrew literature and mystical consciousness, including (but not
limited to) renewed engagement with classical Jewish mysticism that transcends, in
some cases, the religious and secular divide.
While Prooftexts has occasionally published articles on Jewish mystical writing
in the past, we recognize that devoting a whole section to this literature takes the
journal out of its customary comfort zone, and we are grateful to the editors and
readers of Prooftexts for their support of our engagement with these questions. We
sought to provide a concentrated space to begin reflection upon two fundamental
questions in these pages. What can the specialized frame of “Jewish literary history”
contribute to the study of mystical literature? Further, how can our appreciation for
mystical poetics expand the scope of the literary?
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