Hasidic Commentary on the Torah (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)

Wiskind-Elper, Ora

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization（2018/03発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 230 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781906764128
• DDC分類 222.106

Full Description

National Jewish Book
Awards Finalist
for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2018.

Hasidism, a movement of religious awakening and social reform,
originated in the mid-eighteenth century. After two and a half centuries of
crisis, upheaval, and renewal, it remains a vibrant way of life and a
compelling aspect of Jewish experience. This book explores the profound
intellectual and religious issues that the hasidic masters raised in their
Torah commentary, and brings to the fore the living qualities of their sermons
(derashot).

Ora Wiskind-Elper addresses a spectrum of topics: creation,
revelation, and redemption; hermeneutics, epistemology, psychology,
Romanticism, poetry and poetics, art history, Hebrew fiction, cultural history,
and tropes of Jewish suffering and hope. Fully engaged in the texts and their
spirituality, she brings them to bear on postmodernist challenges to
traditional spiritual and religious sensibilities.

This is a comprehensive study, unique in pedagogy, clarity, and
originality. It uses the full range of critical scholarship on hasidism as a
social and ideological movement. At the same time, it maintains a strong focus
on hasidic Torah commentary as a conveyor of theology and value. Each of its
chapters presents a fundamentally new approach. Wiskind-Elper's translations
are in themselves an innovative moment in the tradition and spiritual history
of the passages she offers.

Contents

Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. Dimensions of Collective Self-Understanding
Beginnings
Receiving, Revealing
'When Your Wellsprings Will Flow Forth'
To Create New Worlds with Words
'They Made Their Souls Anew'
To See and to be Seen
'Well said, Moses!'

2. Modes of Reading
Metaphors We Live By
A Parable in Wait
Imagining the World
The Essence of Being Human
Bread-Eaters and Dreamers
Know Me in Translation
Conclusions So Far
How to Teach, How to Learn
To Know or Not to Know
Finding the Words
The Secret of Exile
The Secret of Redemption
Summing Up

3. Responses to a Shifting Landscape
Introduction
The Space in the Middle
'For the Times They are A-Changin' '
Reason for Hope
The Inward Turn
Modernity and Its Discontents
'God is in the Detail'
Prophets of the Past, Prophets of the Future
Deep Blue Sky and Yellow Stars
Song of Dust and Ashes

Postscript
Bibliography
Index