The Jewish mystical traditions

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-48
Author(s):  
Joseph H. Berke
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Traditions

scholarly journals Responses to Critics: What Makes Mysticism Critical? (Or, What Makes Critique Mystical?)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Palmquist
Keyword(s):  
Final Word ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Negative View ◽  
Mystical Traditions

Abstract After summarizing the content of my book, Kant and Mysticism (Palmquist 2019), I warn against four preliminary misconceptions. The book never argues that Kant viewed himself as a mystic, fully acknowledges Kant’s negative view of mysticism, offers no comprehensive overview of mystical traditions, and aims to initiate a dialogue, not to have the final word. I then respond to the foregoing essays by the five critics.

scholarly journals Creativity, Community, Change: Functions of and motives for singing niggunim

1970 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 284-305
Author(s):  
Ruth Illman
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Community Change ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Mystical Traditions ◽  
Depth Interviews

Jewish musical practices stemming from Kabbalah and Hasidic mystical traditions are currently the object of growing attention among a variety of different Jewish communities in Europe and North America, as well as in non-Jewish spiritual circles. This article focuses on contemporary practices of niggunim – the (mostly) wordless melodies with roots in Hasidic Jewish traditions, sung, chanted and sometimes danced in preparation for, or as a form of, ardent prayer. The practice is seen as an example of the expressive, engaging, emotional and embodied forms of prayer that currently attract many Jews of different institutional attachments. As niggunim travel into new contexts, they are reframed and reconsidered in order to meet the needs and expectations of contemporary religious communities, characterised by a liberal and egalitarian, global and transformative religiosity. The article seeks to explore the different functions niggunim are put to today and the motives which drive different people to engage in the practice. The analysis is based on ethno-graphic material in the form of in-depth interviews conducted among progressive Jews in the London area. As a conclusion, the article suggests an approach to contemporary niggunim practices that incorporates perspectives from both literature and ethnography in order to deepen the understanding of the motives for and functions of singing niggunim today.

A Judeo-Arab-Muslim Continuum: Edmond Amran El Maleh's Poetics of Fragments

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-32
Author(s):  
Irene Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean Region ◽  
Deep Inspiration ◽  
Ethical Dimension ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
Mystical Traditions ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Postcolonial Writers

The work of Jewish Moroccan writer Edmond Amran El Maleh (1917–2010) explores the coextensive experience of Muslims and Jews in Morocco and the larger Arab-Mediterranean region, tracing a continuum of Judeo-Arab-Muslim affiliation. This notion of affiliation is reflected in a highly dynamic, fluid poetics, fed by a secular engagement with Jewish and Islamic mystical traditions and with a range of modernist and postcolonial writers. El Maleh found deep inspiration in Walter Benjamin's work on the ethical dimension of allegory as informed by kabbalistic notions of language. The chaotic profusion of events and images in El Maleh's third novel, Mille ans, un jour (“A Thousand Years, One Day”) reflects Benjamin's “Kabbalistic shard” and his valorization of the “scraps of history.” This discursive mode challenges the totalizing narratives and racialized binaries undergirding forms of violence that El Maleh identifies in colonialism and fascism, as well as in contemporary Zionism. His work thus aims to dissolve the false oppositional binary through which the identities of Jew and Arab have come to be understood.

Evidence for stages of meditation in early Taoism

1997 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold D. Roth
Keyword(s):  
Lao Tzu ◽  
Chuang Tzu ◽  
Meditative Practice ◽  
Mystical Traditions ◽  
Breathing Meditation

The role of some form of breathing meditation in most of the world's great mystical traditions has long been known, but few have seen much evidence for this in early Taoism. By ‘early Taoism’ I mean the formative stages of the tradition, from its mysterious origins to the completion of the Huai-nan-Tzu (139 B.C.). Perhaps scholars have seen so little evidence of meditative practice in early Taoism because they have tended to focus almost exclusively on its famous foundational works, Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu and have, furthermore, tended to treat them as works of abstract philosophy. In my research I have been particularly interested in the experiential basis of the philosophy found in the Lao-Tzu and the Chuang-Tzu and in a variety of other related texts that have hitherto been generally overlooked as sources for early Taoism. In order to clarify the context for the present investigation of meditative stages, I would like to present briefly the most relevant hypotheses from this research:

A Theoretical Component of Political Inegalitarianism in Perso-Islamicate Thought

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-254
Author(s):  
ALIREZA SHOMALI
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Mystical Traditions ◽  
Theoretical Component

AbstractThe disparity of human intellects dictum imposes an a priori limit of thinking and imagining that partially precludes the emergence of democratic thought in the Iranian commonsense. This paper presents three exemplary accounts of the disparity dictum in Perso-Islamicate philosophical and mystical traditions – by Ghazzali, Sadra and Molavi. The goal is to see how, despite varying verbalism, these thinkers share the view that human beings are not ultimately unified – and, accordingly, that humans cannot have equal rights to political power.

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