Walter Benjamin and the Weak Messianic Power

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German intellectual of Jewish descent, a well-known literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator and essayist, and a key figure in continental philosophy. His works on topics such as historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism have had a marked influence on contemporary aesthetic theories and the development of Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. These articles will focus on the analysis of the concept of messianism, which Benjamin develops in his work “On the concept of history” or “Theses on the philosophy of history” (1940). Messianism here is neither a theological dogma nor a modern figure of the utopian. Benjamin’s messianic time does not refer to the future, but to the urgency of the “now.” The author contrasts the “weak messianic force” of the tradition of the oppressed, which demands the past with the realization of happiness and liberation in the present, and Jetztzeit – a model of messianic time, open and nonlinear time of rupture, based on modern (contemporary) forms of collective experience past and liberation memory (Eingedenken).

The Doctrine of Exile in Kabbalah

Exile (galut)—and the attempt to end it—is one of primary aims and motifs of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. Kabbalists have conceived of exile as the existential state of man (the divine soul trapped in the body), the predicament and mission of the Jewish people (banished from Israel), and, most dramatically, the current condition of God and the cosmos. Classic kabbalistic works, such as the Zohar, explain that man’s original sin caused the initial rupture within God, while humanity’s ongoing transgressions increasingly intensify it. Since the earliest kabbalistic writings, in the twelfth century, and continuing until today, numerous Kabbalists have boldly asserted that the primary purpose of both the Torah and man’s deeds is to mend these fractures by unifying the male and female aspects of God, raising the dispersed divine sparks, and elevating man’s dislocated soul. Through these mystical processes, the exile will draw to a close, ushering in the messianic age.

Introduction: Religion, Experience, and Narrative

At the end of his famous book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem points to the important role stories have played in Hasidism, the latest phase in Jewish Mysticism, and he closes his lectures with the following story: When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer—and what he had set out to perform was done [...]

Revelation in the Jewish Tradition

This chapter opens with a note on the naive concept of revelation as it appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. An account of the accommodation of Jewish thought to Hellenistic models by Philo leads to a remark on Talmud and early Jewish mysticism. Medieval philosophers such as Saadia and Maimonides attempted not only to present Jewish belief and practice in rational form but to justify its claim to possession of the only authentic revelation; the kabbalistic or mystical reaction is described. The moral, historical, and scientific concerns brought into focus by Spinoza, who appealed to reason as the criterion of what constituted revelation, are then outlined; Jewish responses to issues he raised are discussed. The chapter shows how Jewish responses to the Enlightenment generated different interpretations of revelation, leading to the formation of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox denominations of Judaism. Moving rapidly through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we survey interpretations of revelation by Jewish thinkers including Hermann Cohen (‘progressive’ revelation), Martin Buber (revelation as ‘encounter’), J. D. Soloveitchik (halakha as a priori system), Abraham J. Heschel (between immanence and transcendence), Emil Fackenheim (Holocaust theology), and Tamar Ross (feminism, ‘cumulative’ revelation), concluding with a selection of contemporary thinkers who reinterpret the language of revelation in non-dogmatic terms.

JEWISH MYSTICISM. PART 2

The review examines two approaches to Kabbalah: innovative and orthodox, with appropriate argumentation of the parties.

Shevirat Ha-Kelim: Jewish Mysticism and the Catalan Matrix for Dialogue and Conflict

Late Medieval anti-Jewish violence is a well-known phenomenon, but its origins and institutionalization are still blurred and enigmatic. In thirteenth and fourteenth century Catalonia, the denouement of the increasing popular hostility against the Jewry was particularly dramatic. The seeds of violence were the result of a long and complex process of social, theological and political interactions. In this contribution, we will discuss the intellectual matrix of medieval anti-Semitism in Catalonia and its relationship with the rising of scholastics and with the theoretical foundations of Catalan politics. We will also approach its counterpart: the Jewish response to collective suffering.

“For the Letter Kills, but the Spirit Gives Life”: Halakha Versus Kabbalah in the Study of Jewish Mysticim1

In the 19th century, some Jewish scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement presented Kabbalah as the vital, spiritual and mystical aspect of Judaism, and juxtaposed it to legalistic, conservative, and petrified Halakha. Jewish neo-romantic and Zionist thinkers adopted this perception, which Christian Kabbalists and Hebraists first formulated in the Renaissance period. The assumption concerning the distinction and tension between Jewish mysticism and Halakha had a significant impact on the modern academic study of Judaism and it still governs the academic discipline of Jewish mysticism that Gershom Scholem and his disciples founded. This article argues that the modern identification of Kabbala as Jewish mysticism, and the assumed dichotomy between spiritual, vital Kabbalah, and dogmatic, petrified Halakha are a modern Jewish adaptation of the Pauline antithesis between the letter that kills and the Spirit that gives life.

Sir Thomas Tresham and the Christian Cabala

The Christian Cabala, a Christianised version of Jewish mysticism originating in Renaissance Italy, reached England in the early sixteenth century and was met with a variety of responses from English Catholics in the Reformation period. While ‘cabala’ was used as a slur by both Protestant and Catholic polemicists, Robert Persons drew positively from the work of the Italian cabalist Pietro Galatino, and in 1597 Sir Thomas Tresham, then a prisoner at Ely, described in detail a complex cabalistic design to decorate a window. While the Christian Cabala was only one source of inspiration for Tresham, he was sufficiently confident in his cabalistic knowledge to attempt manipulations of names of God in his designs for the window at Ely and to insert measurements of cabalistic significance in the gardens on his Lyveden estate. Persons’s and Tresham’s willingness to draw on Christian cabalism even after its papal condemnation suggests the intellectual independence of English Catholics, who were prepared to make use of esoteric traditions to bolster their faith. The evidence for experiments with cabalism by a few English Catholics highlights the need for further re-evaluation of the significance of esoteric traditions within the English Counter-Reformation and the eclectic nature of post-Reformation English Catholic mysticism.