Elliot Wolfson: Jewish Mysticism as a Garment of the Soul

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The opening of this shiur, in 18Forty’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

Professor Elliot Wolfson, it's such a privilege and pleasure to be sitting with you here in California where you're a professor emeritus, but your acclaim is global with your incredible contribution to Jewish mysticism, to the broader area of mysticism, and the broader academic field. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I look forward to our dialogue. So do I. So what is Jewish mysticism? I regularly taught a class on introduction to Jewish mysticism for forty years and I always would start by saying the topic of this course has two different subjects, Jewish and mysticism. And it will take a lifetime to learn what Jewish does not entail, so I'm going to just go to mysticism, and then go back to how Jewish modifies mysticism. So mysticism is a notoriously difficult term to define, and in fact, there are debates whether or not we can think of mysticism in a cross-cultural way, or it's sometimes referred to in a perennial or essentialist way versus those who argue that it must always be understood in terms of context. Jewish mysticism, Christian mysticism, Islamic mysticism, and so on. But for our purposes, I'm going to assume something of a commonality and I would say mysticism has several major features as it is expressed in different religious cultures. One would be having a kind of direct experience of the Divine or what is considered to be the absolute. Even more profoundly would be the emphasis on a unitive experience that one has with that absolute, which would break down the distinction between the self and the Divine.

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1. 0:01Professor Elliot Wolfson, it's such a privilege and pleasure to be sitting with you here in…
2. 3:21And all of those features can be found in Jewish mysticism in varying degrees across the…
3. 7:17Maimonides called the necessary of existence, the mechuyav hametziut. So you see nothing and therefore everything…
4. 10:57That's the nullification, exactly, precisely. So this becomes very accentuated in Hasidic texts, the teaching of…
5. 14:51But there is a debate in the Talmud about if prayers or commandments require intention, “mitzvot…
6. 18:38No, because it's still working within the kind of rabbinic ethos, so the number of commandments…
7. 22:41dedication to the study of this material and what I write is an act of prayer.…
8. 26:39with the exception of that first break, all the other breaks are dependent on human transgression.…
9. 30:31Well, it's opened it up obviously. You know, in the last century, first of all, let's…
10. 34:20They entered into the orchard of the four different interpretations of – Right. So, the only…

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