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Moshe Idel gave a interesting series of lectures last winter on the power of language, specifically arts combinatoria, a ability to create a universal knowledge from language. The audio was recently posted. The second lecture on Derrida, Eco, and Culiano give insight into Idel himself. Idel’s use of a single line of Derrida to show affinity to his own project is an old theme for him. But new is Idel’s highlighting that Culiano at the end of his life turned from the study of phenomena to theory, with an implication that this lecture of his was his own turn to theory. These “theory lectures” seem to have already been implicit in his recent work on Kabbalah in Italy.

But were these three thinkers his inspiration right from the start in the 1980’s? It seems they were, but not explicitly. Does anyone remember any relevant passages? If Idel now lists himself and Kabbalah as the study of (the power of) language and magic- Is this a change or implicit already in his PhD? His work from a few years ago Absorbing Perfections still used the words mysticism and esotericism. Can we reread the entire Idel project as disconnected from mysticism and see that it was originally language and magic (as well as esotericism and ecstatic techniques)?

Idel’s first self-written book was the published version of his dissertation on Abulafia where he wrote as an opening paragraph:

The method for attaining wisdom proposed by Abulafia as an alternative to philosophical speculation is essentially a linguistic one.Language is conceived by him as a universe in itself, which yields aricher and superior domain for contemplation than does the natural world

He was telling us right from the start that he is concerned with language as a means to wisdom. Can his project be re-read as knowledge through language? As a side point, am I the only one bothered that Idel ignores how Leibnitz criticized the medieval attempts as arbitrary and not scientific, while Idel glides from the modern to the medieval without a break?

In the same recent lecture Idel claimed that history and causality is over-rated; there are other sources of knowledge. He dismisses Thomas Kuhn & Feyerabend for not recognizing the role of Ars Combinatoria, the recombination of letters as a valid source of knowledge. Eco and Derrida through their interest in ars combinatoria have transcended the Enlightenment interest in science and “clear and distinct ideas.” Idel applauds this. Unlike the limited knowledge offered by theosophic kabbalah such as the Zohar or Ari, or the limited knowledge offered through science, the knowledge of the magical recombination of letters contains all the knowledge of the universe.This would explain why he has never attempted any historical narrative or intellectual history. But it also seems to assume that Idel thinks contemporary readers will resonate with Abulafia, or at least Idel’s books, since Eco is on the best-seller list. And if Eco if read itis because people are beyond history and science.

Lecture 1:
“Sefer Yetzirah and its Commentaries: A major source for ars combinatoria”
Tuesday 8 February 2011, 5 pm, at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford.

Lecture 2:
“Ars Combinatoria in Modern Times: Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Ioan P. Culianu”
Wednesday 9 February 2011, 8pm, at the David Patterson Seminar at Yarnton Manor.

Lecture 3:
“The Transition of Ars Combinatoria from Kabbalah to European Culture:
Ramon Llull, Pseudo-Llull, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola”
Thursday 10 February 2011, 5 pm, at Merton College.

In the Rietbeg Museum in Zurich they are having an exhibit on mysticism, including Jewish mysticism. The website has lots of uploaded pictures and video, however only some of them have English subtitles.

MYSTICISM – YEARNING FOR THE ABSOLUTE
23 SEPTEMBER 2011 TO 15 JANUARY 2012
The Museum Rietberg is proud to present the world’s first culturally comparative exhibition on mysticism.

This elusive religious phenomenon will be illustrated by the example of forty male and female mystics: their lives and writings demonstrate just how richly varied spiritual experience can be. The mystics chosen for the exhibition come from the great religions of the world – Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity – and span the period from the 6th century BC until the 19th century.

Here are two of the Jewish exhibits, the one for the Besht has the same display as the Ramak.
ABRAHAM ABULAFIA (1240-1291) EXPERIENCE OF GOD IN THE HOLY LANGUAGE

MOSES CORDOVERO (1522-1570) RE-ESTABLISHING UNITY

Some of the other one’s that are interesting is the little film for Dionysios THE AREOPAGITE and the recording of Rumi in Persian.

H/T AviSolo

Broadcasts on Jewish Philosophy at PHILOSOPHER’S ZONE.
Australian Radio Series on Jewish Philosophy with transcripts

Yesterday morning, I received by email the new issue of Bookjed. Steve Bayme of the AJC wrote a review of a book and in the middle of the review inserts the following paragraph explaining what he thinks are the limits of Modern Orthodoxy. It seemed like a ready-made argument that can apply to a lot of topics.

More generally, this small volume stands as a significant document illustrating the tenuous place Modern Orthodoxy occupies on the Jewish communal map. To invoke a metaphor, Modern Orthodox leaders frequently approach the edge of the water but fail to wade into it. The authors comprehend the significance and beauty of sexuality and articulate it quite well. They are informed by secular sources of knowledge and culture. They understand fully that there are significant points of tension between Judaic heritage and modern culture. But they appear unwilling to confront those tensions openly. I should add, in fairness to the authors, that the same might be said for Orthodox leaders with respect to questions of Biblical scholarship, cooperation with the non-Orthodox movements, Jewish gentile relations, problems of reason and faith, the meaning of revelation for moderns, and doubtless one could easily add to this list. My personal favorite concerned a leading Modern Orthodox professor of Judaic Studies, who developed a popular lecture for synagogue scholar in residence programs in which he claimed that archeological research corroborated the Biblical narrative as if there were no conflicts between archeology and Torah. One only hopes he has abandoned the lecture given the weight of recent archeological research!
Instructors willing to go beyond the book and “enter the waters” fully will be doing themselves and their students a great service. They may even create models that Modern Orthodox leaders would do well to emulate.

Steven Bayme serves as National Director, Contemporary Jewish Life Department for the American Jewish Committee (AJC)

There is a new article in Modern Judaism “When Orthodoxy was not as chic as it is today”: The Jewish Forum and American Modern Orthodoxy By Ira Robinson and Maxine Jacobson. It nicely shows the different sub-communities of modern Orthodoxy and the change in issues over the decades. It is actually a nice summery article for those who need an introduction to 20th century issues in modern Orthodoxy. The article is not ideological, rather social history. Maxine Jacobson has a wonderful unpublished PhD on Rabbi Leo Jung, which should be published.

The article is behind a subscription wall.

The article shows how modern Orthodoxy had to prove it can accept science, democracy, women’s education, and labor rights. It also nicely documents the very slow separation of the Conservative and modern Orthodox movements. An Orthodox journal could still debate the use of the mechitza into the early 1960’s. The article highlights one aspect of the division that others neglect, that is the emphasis on day schools over public schools for modern Orthodoxy. The reason for the commandments are hygienic and having medical insight. One gets a nice summary of how important Mordechai Kaplan was in the formation of Orthodoxy’s reaction. Rabbi Leo Jung, Kaplan replacement, at the Jewish Center formed his identity in reaction.

The article shows where the change in language occurred between Torah-tradition to modern Orthodoxy with the shift from the generation of Jung to that of Tradition magazine – Lamm and Rackman. The article also provides a backdrop of why figures like Lamm were so adamant against producing popular literature in the 70’s and 80’s, allowing Artscroll to take the market. They felt that they were dealing with philosophy and therefore above the prior generation. Unfortunately the article is marred by a few anachronism of using 2011 Orthodox language when explaining older positions.

The article discusses the anonymous Dayyan alYehud who in 1962 wanted to remove the Conservative movement from Orthodoxy, and criticizes Lieberman and Finkelstein. Yet fails to discuss that in 1952 the same Dayyan alYehud gloated and exalted over Abraham Joshua Heschel as the new and true voice of modern Orthodoxy, combining piety with worldliness. The same anonymous author elsewhere praised Rav Tzair and his method. Lieberman had little respect for Heschel or Rav Tzair, so there is a greater back-story- probably more of an in-house debate.

The Jewish Forum was an American Orthodox monthly published from 1918 to 1962. It reflected issues and developments affecting Orthodox Judaism in America, from the twenties to the sixties. In these decades,
Orthodoxy went from being a threatened entity on the American scene to a well-recognized, respected force in Judaism and The Jewish Forum played a role in this transformation.

The concept of Modern Orthodoxy was not well defined at The Jewish Forum’s inception. Indeed, the very term ‘‘Modern Orthodoxy’’ for the journal’s philosophy only appears for the first time, in August 1937, in an article entitled ‘‘Neo and Modern Orthodox Judaism,’’ written by Phineas Israeli, a 1902 graduate of The Jewish Theological Seminary. Modern Orthodoxy, according to Israeli, is solely an American phenomenon. The first two aspects of Modern Orthodoxy were established by Moses Mendelssohn and Samson Raphael Hirsch, and consist of a combination of loyalty to Jewish tradition and love for general culture and rationalism. It is the innovations in practice and more up to date interpretations of Jewish doctrine, appealing to the rising generation, that Israeli felt were distinctive to American Modern Orthodoxy. In the absence of ‘‘Modern Orthodoxy,’’ writers in The Jewish Forum used various terms to denote the Judaism they supported, including ‘‘Traditional Judaism,’’ ‘‘Torah-true Judaism’’, ‘‘Authentic Judaism,’’ and ‘‘Jewish Jews.’’

One difficulty in defining The Jewish Forum’s ideal Orthodoxy was the presence of the Conservative movement. Competition was clearly evident between Conservative Judaism and Orthodoxy in the early part of the twentieth century precisely because Conservative Judaism was widely perceived to be similar to Orthodoxy. The journal’s relationship with Conservative Judaism further demonstrated Modern Orthodoxy’s lack of clear boundaries.Dr Meyer Waxman wrote in 1924 that there was a tendency for Conservative Judaism to identify with traditional Judaism and he discussed the widespread view that the Conservative synagogue did ‘‘border very closely upon the Orthodox.’’ Rabbi Leo Jung also referred to Conservatism as, ‘‘the other kind of Orthodoxy.’’

The relationship between Conservative and Orthodox in The Jewish Forum was thus quite complex. There were articles in The Jewish Forum written by Conservative authors and there were a few Conservative rabbis, over the years, who served on its board.

When Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan presented his program for the reconstruction of Judaism, accompanied by his condemnation of Orthodox Judaism, as out of date, in The Menorah Journal of August 1920, The Jewish Forum was one of the first Orthodox media to face his challenge and to enter the debate about what Orthodoxy stood for. Rabbi Leo Jung thus issued his rebuttal to Kaplan in The Jewish Forum of April 1921. In light of Kaplan’s challenge, Orthodox rabbis were obliged to take stock and consider methods and approaches that would become characteristic of Modern Orthodoxy. Kaplan’s program was their call to action. As Rabbi Jung stated:

The only answer to Kaplanism is: the immediate convention of a living Orthodox body to work out a systematic educational scheme for the re-assertion of Orthodoxy, absolutely faithful in principle, absolutely fresh in method.

The contemporary relevance of the Bible was demonstrated in the journal in terms of its congruence with the principles of contemporary medicine. Judaic Laws were shown to be healthy and humane in accord with the wisdom of the Torah. Mosaic law and modern medical science were represented as blending harmoniously and being identical in basic concepts and tenets. Thus, Jacob B. Glenn, a medical doctor and contributing editor to The Jewish Forum presented a series of articles, in 1958, called ‘‘Modern Medicine in the Light of Mosaic Law’’ dealing with the relevance of the Bible with respect to contemporary medicine. Many examples were given: shell fish and pork, prohibited to Jews, caused disease; cleanliness of the body, dealt with in minute details in Jewish law, such as the laws of Niddah [marital purity laws] and washing hands before touching food, kept the body healthy and prevented infectious diseases. The author wrote that modern medicine has shown that hereditary diseases resulted from inbreeding or incestuous marriages, which were prohibited in Jewish Law. Dr Glenn further wrote that medicine demonstrates that the laws of Sabbath are conducive to a healthier existence both mentally and physically. Dietary laws were also explained as a protection against unhealthy food.

Education for women was a cause The Jewish Forum promoted as early as the twenties. In 1930 it published an article, ‘‘The Place of Woman in Jewish Education’’ in which its author, Freda Fine wrote:

Gone is the day when the male child was the center of the Jewish household: when he alone was to carry on the tradition of the Talmud. Today the young Jewess shares the classroom with her brother.
We therefore stress the education of the daughters, so that they, as well as the sons, may be leaders in Jewish education movements.

In the forties and fifties the Orthodox and Conservative movements became better defined and gradually became more separate entities. In 1961, a guest editor, calling himself, ‘‘Dayyan Al-Yehud,’’ pointed out that the Orthodox movement had moved in a different direction than the Conservative movement:

There is a definite trend in American Jewish life, . . . toward a recognition of Halakhic authority as enunciated by the heads of Yeshibhoth . . .We regret, however, to state without fear of contradiction, that such is not the case in the rank and file of Conservative Judaism in America.

He accused the Conservatives of lack of consistent loyalty to Torah-tradition:
Witness . . . tampering with the inviolability of the sanctity and purity of family life, and the basic changes in the ketubah document, sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly of America under the guidance of its prime mover and careerist, Saul Lieberman, professor of Talmud.

Whereas previously The Jewish Forum had been somewhat ambiguous in its relationship to Conservative scholars and the rabbinic authorities of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in the fifties ‘‘Dayyan Al-Yehud’’ openly questioned the decisions of Louis Finkelstein and Saul Lieberman.

The Jewish Forum, in the late fifties, published an article by a Conservative rabbi claiming that in modern times a mechitza was not valid; ‘‘but in the good and great America of ours, the mixed pew system seems to be just a natural thing . . .’’ While this was not the general stance of the journal, it certainly demonstrated the presence of Conservative writers in the journal, as well as a degree of editorial freedom in The Jewish Forum. However, it also marked the growing division of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. Robert Gordis, a leading Conservative rabbi and scholar, had been on the board of The Jewish Forum since the forties, his first appearance in The Jewish Forum having been in 1925. However, in the early sixties the journal was criticized by some of its readers for having a Conservative rabbi like Gordis on the editorial board. Gordis resigned in 1962 because he was unhappy with editor Charles Raddock’s response to this criticism.

By the 1950s, a new English-speaking Orthodox leadership had come to the fore, prominent among whom were Rabbis Norman Lamm, Emmanuel Rackman, Solomon Scharfman and Joseph Soloveitchik. Increasingly, there were people who did not really identify with The Jewish Forum. The 1958 founding of a new Modern Orthodox journal, Tradition, reflected a significant development in American Modern Orthodoxy.
The demise of The Jewish Forum and the concomitant rise of Tradition seems to be indicative of a generational gap in Orthodoxy circa 1960, and highlights a tension that existed between different generations of American Orthodox rabbis.

By the fifties and sixties, Rabbi Soloveitchik and many younger Modern Orthodox rabbis emphasized research and scholarship and promoted the ideal of the ‘‘scholar rabbi’’ who was trained to interpret the texts, thus leading to a more vigorous Judaism based on more detailed study of Jewish texts and the Jewish past. It had set out to be a journal containing ‘‘reliable studies prepared for popular digestion,’’ but Orthodox readers were no longer as interested in its version of ‘‘popular’’ presentation.

I received an email notice this morning for a brand new Har’EL Yeshiva that will combine the traditional Beit midrash with being a seeker. It will bring Hasidut, creative writing, Moreh Nevukhim, and great books in the Beit Midrash.The Rosh Yeshiva will be Rabbi Herzl Hefter (no ad hominem). Any thoughts?

From the Website -only some of this was in the email.

Over the past 200 years, the world has seen more change than in the previous 5000. These changes pose acute challenges for our faith and traditional way of life, as we hold tenaciously to our sacred traditions while fearlessly engaging a new reality. To deal with those challenges, I am excited to announce the opening of Har’El Yeshiva, a new program for sincere and motivated young men between the ages of 21 and 30 in the Old City of Jerusalem.

(1) What we believe:
The Torah teaches that God created the world and human beings with imperfections. Facing our individual and communal imperfections honestly is the necessary first step to any sort of authentic relationship with ourselves (as individuals), with each other and with God.

We are driven by the conviction that love and devotion to Torah study transforms the individual into a more perfect reflection of Godliness.
At Har’El Yeshiva, we seek to confront challenges openly because we believe that this is our unique responsibility. We believe that love of Torah should develop love of truth and personal growth.

“Existential” Torah
In the post modern era where all authority is suspect, it is insufficient to base religious observance upon obedience alone. Morning seder will commence with the study of Hasidic teachings. This is designed to provide meaningful context for the activities of the rest of the day. We will study the powerful and transformative works of the Mei haShiloah, R. Zadok Hakohen of Lublin and the Sefat Emet. These masters teach that God is present in the human heart. The immediacy of the Divine in the human heart feeds a sense of urgency to facilitate its revelation through the study of Torah, prayer and fear of Heaven. The consciousness of radical Divine immanence provides an authentic traditional framework to absorb the far reaching changes in human society over the last two hundred years.

Students will be inspired to internalize the Torah and make it their own, learning to express themselves creatively. We will encourage our students to draw upon their life experiences to develop their avodat hashem and yir’at shamayim.

Guide to the Perplexed
The Yeshiva will combine intellectual rigor and God-consciousness. This approach is embodied in Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. Generally, mysticism has a complete disdain for the dry demands of logic and language. But, in his work, Maimonides starts from a place of cool Aristotelian rationalism, and follows a course of rigid reasoning about God’s perfection and about the nature of language. Eventually, he comes to the realization that language and logic do have their limits; that reality and religious experience do outstrip the descriptive powers of language; and that silent reverence of a God that cannot be described is the only appropriate attitude. This course will concentrate on these themes, and on Maimonides’ rationalization of the commandments. In his work, we will see an old-fashioned Aristotelianism that nevertheless reaches the same conclusions that Kant and Wittgenstein would later reach.

Writing workshop
In the creative writing workshop, we will deepen our religious and Jewish identity through the medium of creativity. Each session will begin with learning a short passage from one of the traditional Jewish texts: a midrash, a Hasidic story, a short passage from the Guide to the Perplexed, etc. This text will then be the springboard for the actual writing exercise, which will always try to focus on a Jewish theme. Rabbi Nachman wrote that “the imagination is the cornerstone of faith.” We believe that the imagination can be a gateway for a person to enter the palace of devekut and faith.

Great books
Pursuant to our intention to prepare our students to engage the world, we will integrate the following subjects into the yeshiva curriculum in a way which will not compromise the intensity of the Torah studies. We will produce a reading list of essential books on these subjects. The students will meet regularly to discuss these books. At times students themselves will be responsible to moderate the discussion.
A partial list of great books:
Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy”
John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”
Sigmund Freud, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”
Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”
John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Affluent Society”
Ian Barbour, “Science and Religion”
Mircea Eliade, “The Myth of the Eternal Return”
Students will be expected to present to their peers. They will write their presentation for posting on our website.

Read more about Yeshivat Har’El here.

Here is the first dvar Torah that they placed on their web- about the need for a personal calling.

The Sefat Emet says that G-d is continuously calling to each and every one of us: “Lech lecha! – ‘Get thee out!” What differentiates Avraham is that he heard the call.

When we reflect upon the Biblical personalities who hear the voice of God, our first instinct is to think of the call in a literal way, sound waves echoing in the prophet’s inner ear. The Sefat Emet says that this is not so. Rather, God’s voice resonates within each of us, calling us to our spiritual journey. As creatures created in the Divine image, we are charged to attune ourselves to the Divine calling that echoes in our hearts and minds.

There is a nice article in today’s Tablet on Camus and the Jews. It shows his closeness to the Jewish Resistance, his support of Israel, and his Biblical philosophy of absurdity. A study of the influence of major influence of Camus on modern Jewish thought is a desideratum. Much of Holocaust thought -Amery, Wiesel, Fackenheim- is based on Camus. Camus is mixed with Buber in Berkovits, Soloveitchik, and others. And there is a nice volume of Camus Biblical exegesis written by Andre Neher, Exile of the Word. Long term, I am working on an article on Camus in Wiesel’s Hasidic stories.

At the same time, he began to reach out to Jewish friends. To one, Irène Djian, he denounced these “despicable” laws and reassured her: “This wind cannot last if each and every one of us calmly affirmed that the wind smells rotten.” He reminded her he would always stand by her—a remarkable position for a Frenchman to take in 1940, when the vast majority of his compatriots either embraced or accepted the new laws.

Among the few visitors he had was his friend the historian André Chouraqui, a French Algerian Jew whom Camus peppered with questions about the Old Testament, all the while taking notes for the book he was then writing, The Plague.

By then, Chouraqui was already risking his life in the French Resistance, particularly in the critical work of finding homes for Jewish refugee children. Much of this activity centered on Chambon, where the pastor, André Trocmé, had already mobilized the village in the work of welcoming, housing, and hiding these children. By the end of the war, the people of Chambon had saved the lives of at least 3,000 Jewish children and adults.

Indeed, it is the theme of absurdity that most powerfully underscores Camus’ understanding of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. At the political and existential level, Camus felt a visceral connection with the absurd predicament of the young Jewish state. It was a political bond insofar as many on the French left, from whom Camus was estranged, had grown deeply anti-Zionist in the wake of the Suez War. In 1957, he publicly affirmed his sympathy and support for Israel. His reasons still echo today: Not only must Europe accept Israel’s existence as the only possible response to the continent’s complicity in the Final Solution, but Israel must also exist as a counter-example to the oppressive rule of Arab leaders. The Arab people, he declared, wished for deserts covered with olive trees, not canons. Let Israel show the way.

His plea for cooperation and collaboration between Jews and Arabs in Israel echoed his pleas to his fellow pied-noirs and Arabs in Algeria.

Yet Camus’ deepest and most intriguing bond to Judaism is revealed in his philosophy of the absurd. In early 1941, when Vichy was preparing a second round of anti-Semitic legislation and the papers in France and Algeria were giving free rein to anti-Semitic rhetoric, Camus completed his philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The opening lines are among the best known written by Camus: “There is just one truly important philosophical question: suicide. To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else … is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Of course that question needed to be answered in 1941. How could it be otherwise, given the dire predicament in which the French and French Jews, along with Camus, found themselves?

Job and Sisyphus, in short, are heaved into a world shorn of transcendence and meaning. In response to their demand for answers, they get only silence. Herein lies the absurdity, Camus writes: It is “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.”

The silence of the world, in effect, only becomes silence when human beings enter the equation. All too absurdly, Job demands meaning. “Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard/ I cry aloud, but there is no judgment.” And no less absurdly, Job must ask himself what he must do if meaning is not to be found? What is our next step if meaning fails to show up at our appointed rendezvous? “But where shall wisdom be found?/ And where is the place of understanding?”

He is a Job who answers God’s deafening and dismal effort at self-justification with scornful silence.
Read the Rest Here

This comes from a CFP for an upcoming conference in philosophy of religion. I found it a nice list of what’s currently discussed and relevant in philosophy of religion. I thought some of my readers may be looking for reading for the summer or the winter break. What made this list list especially useful was the list of both authors and topics.

Phenomenology of Religion
The thought of Chrétien, Henry, Lacoste, Levinas, Marion, and Ricoeur
Topics: the gift; the work of art; appearance and transcendence; call and response

Religion and Politics
The thought of Agamben, Asad, Connolly, Derrida, de Vries, Girard, Habermas, Schmitt, and Taylor
Topics: political theology; the post-secular; sovereignty; religion and violence; pluralism

Religion and Speculative Realism
The thought of Brassier, Harman, Laruelle, and Meillassoux
Topics: materialism; correlationism; nihilism; the things themselves; divine inexistence; ‘future Christ’

Beyond Theism and Atheism
The thought of Caputo, Kearney, Kristeva, Milbank, Vattimo
Topics: kenosis; anatheism; weak theology; a/theology; radical orthodoxy

Continental Thought, Religion, and Aesthetics
The artwork of Bresson, Caravaggio, Celan, Chagall, Dostoyevsky, Dumont, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kahlo, Kapoor, Kiarostami, Kiefer, Malick, Newman, O’Keefe, and Stevens
The thought of Cavell, Cixous, Critchley, Irigaray, Marion, Nancy, and Rancière
Topics: transcendence in art; image and icon; creativity and creation; representation and idolatry

Immanentism and Religion
Agamben, Badiou, Bergson, Deleuze, James, Foucault, Keller, and Žižek
Topics: self-organization; the event; plurality; bio-power; polydoxy

From Here

A Guest Post by Rabbi Avraham Bronstein- He is considering a year of Occupy Parsha.
Rabbi Avraham Bronstein currently serves as Program Director of the Great Neck Synagogue. He previously served as Assistant Rabbi of The Hampton Synagogue where he developed and coordinated the extensive Cultural and Adult-Educational Program.

Sermon: Occupy Noah

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote on Parshat Noach:

The Flood tells us what happens to civilization when individuals rule and there is no collective…It was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the thinker who laid the foundations of modern politics in his classic Leviathan (1651), who – without referring to the Flood – gave it its best interpretation. Before there were political institutions, said Hobbes, human beings were in a “state of nature.” They were individuals, packs, bands. Lacking a stable ruler, an effective government and enforceable laws, people would be in a state of permanent and violent chaos – “a war of every man against every man” – as they competed for scarce resources. There would be “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Such situations exist today in a whole series of failed or failing states. That is precisely the Torah’s description of life before the Flood. When there is no rule of law to constrain individuals, the world is filled with violence.

As I read Sack’s piece, I got the sense that making his point about failed states or chaotic, violent societies really takes the bite out of the narrative. It teaches us a lesson we already know about, say, Rwanda, but it doesn’t necessarily teach us about ourselves. If anything, we come away with a false assurance, almost a cultural triumphalism.

Instead, I would argue that the pre-Flood landscape Sacks calls “Hobbesian” is actually much closer to Wall Street, 2011 than Iraq, 2005. Our new Guilded Age, with its vast wealth and innovation but gaping chasm between haves and have-nots, is the direct result of an unregulated “war of every many against every man,” where the winners wield the political process itself as a weapon, using their resources to ensure that it represents their interests as opposed to those of society at large.

The Rabbis were eerily sensitive to this in their own depiction of the pre-Flood society. They describe a remarkable situation where, despite an environment of amazing prosperity, people were robbed of the opportunity to succeed:

The wantonness of this generation was in a measure due to the ideal conditions under which mankind lived before the flood. They knew neither toil nor care, and as a consequence of their extraordinary prosperity they grew insolent….So cunningly were their depredations planned that the law could not touch them. If a countryman brought a basket of vegetables to market, they would edge up to it, one after the other, and abstract a bit, each in itself of petty value, but in a little while the dealer would have none left to sell.

It doesn’t take a great imagination to make the jump to deceptive ATM fees, crippling student loans, punitive foreclosure procedures, and taxpayer bailouts of “too big to fail” financial institutions. The laws on the books that provide no protection to the weak nor accountability for the powerful ring strikingly familiar as well.

The amount of overall wealth in our society is truly staggering, yet our culture’s blinding focus on individualism has resulted in both the rich getting richer and social mobility becoming harder. In short, the “hamas/corruption” that doomed the world to the Flood was not Bernie Madoff – it was AIG and Goldman Sachs.

The Rabbis, as is well known, were ambivalent about Noah as a character:

“These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a righteous, innocent man in his generation” (Gen 6:9). Rashi: “in his generations.” Some of our Sages expound this to his praise: all the more so had he lived in a generation of righteous people, he would have been even more righteous. And there are those who expound it to his defamation: by the standard of his generation he was righteous, but had he lived in the generation of Abraham he would have been considered as nothing.

The most damning critique of Noah for those who thought less highly of him was his silent acceptance of the Flood without protest. In contrast to Abraham who forcefully resisted God’s plan to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gemorah, at possible risk to himself, Noah quietly built his Ark, content to save himself. He may have assured himself that his neighbors and associates deserved their fate, or he may not have really thought about it much at all.

I would argue that, according to this reading, Noah perfectly embodied the harshly individualistic culture of his generation. The same lack of shared responsibility than enabled Noah’s peers to steal each others vegetables blinded him to his responsibility to society at large. In fact, his success came at their expense. Noah may well have been righteous, but he was certainly “in his generation.” There are surely many Noahs in our world today, people who live privately decent lives but do not address the systemic failures and injustices of the system. Noah demonstrates a passive “hamas” by accepting the world as presented to him, by trying to succeed within the prevailing system and not making himself fully aware of its ramifications and larger costs.

The Midrash maintains that the extended period it took Noah to build the Ark was intended to attract the interest of those around him, so as to make them aware of what was going on so that they would reform their behavior. It could well have also been to sensitize Noah to the implications of his own lifestyle, to demonstrate to him that by continuing to passively live his life, he was condemning everyone around him to the coming flood.

Perhaps a question we need to ask ourselves is: what are the Arks that we build in our own lives to secure our own prosperity, and what are the costs (social, economic, moral) to the world at large?

Meet the new Shabbat- Same as the old Shabbat.
One Generation got old…Got a revolution Got to revolution

Forty years ago, the Jewish Catalog gave instructions for creating a pot-luck local Shabbat as a way of bringing the spirit of the Havurah to your own community. Unlike the stuffy organized synagogue, this shabbat would be participatory, celebratory, and have a counter-culture ethos. At the same time NCSY put out a little mustard colored pamphlet on how to run a circa 1972 shabbaton of asking to use the basement of a synagogue, invite friends, photocopy benchers, find a kosher take-out store for food. Unlike the stuffy organized synagogue, this shabbat would be ruah, singing, and participatory. The ethos would be counter counter-culture, how you dont need the counter-culture.

Now we have a wave of social-action, occupy {insert location here}, and feeling the establishment is against social -justice. They feel that Judaism has become injustice and libertarianism. There is a new blog called Occupy Judaism with the byline “Bringing Occupy Wall Street to the Jews.” In it we have an important document to recreate Shabbat as an Occupy Shabbat. Unlike the stuffy organized synagogue, this one will be social action oriented. The 1970’s rejected the organizational man of the 1950’s and this one rejects the organizational man of the 1990’s. As I read it, it looks and sounds like many documents of the early 1970’s, except for the absence of the faux-Hasidic ideal. It could almost have been written by NJOP of Effie Buchwald circa 1980 (except for the egalitarianism.)
For those old enough to remember, substitute at the right places “Save Soviet Jewry” “Russia is not healthy for Jews and other living things” “Free Biafra” “Never Again”

Want to Occupy Shabbat in your community? Here’s how to get started!

Start planning a week in advance.
Decide whether you want to do Kabbalat Shabbat and a potluck dinner, or just a potluck dinner.
Check in with your local occupation’s relevant working groups to make sure you won’t be creating a disturbance and find a good location to hold your event. Aim for a place that’s relatively quiet and decently lit at night.
Create an online sign-up sheet where people can volunteer to take on responsibilities for different pieces of the service or dinner. We recommended either Google Docs or Etherpad.
For Kabbalat Shabbat:
Determine what kind of service you want to have. Aim for the highest level of inclusivity as possible according to the needs of your community.
Aim for gender neutrality – welcoming people of all genders to lead and participate in services, without division.
You will want to find experienced volunteers to lead services – preferably one for Kabbalat Shabbat and one for Maariv.
If you expect a larger crowd, you may want to have several people with strong voices supporting the service leader.
If you need help learning the liturgy, check out Siddur Audio.
You may want to bring extra siddurim (prayer books), kippot/yarlmulkes, and instruments (if applicable) for those that do not have or who forget to bring their own.
For Shabbat dinner:
You will need volunteers to say the blessings over grape juice and challah, as well as birkat hamazon (grace after meals).
Make sure that potluck participants sign-up to bring a kiddush cup, grape juice, challah, a challah cover, water for people to wash with, a towel for hand drying, and some bentshers (prayerbooks containing grace after meals and Shabbat songs). You will also need bags for trash and recycling.
If it will be cold and/or wet outside, consider bringing a folding table.
Try to ensure an even mix of appetizers, entrees and desserts.
Encourage people to bring either their own reusable plates and utensils from home, or biodegradable plates, utensils and napkins to share with others. Don’t forget serving utensils!
For either Kabbalat Shabbat or Shabbat dinner:
You should find someone to give a d’var tzdek – a short Torah teaching that connects the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement back to either the current Torah portion or to Jewish values more broadly. Check out AJWS and Jewcology for ideas.
Create a Facebook, Tumblr or Eventbrite page calling for a Kabbalat Shabbat service and/or Shabbat potluck dinner at your local occupation.
Set the start-time for shortly after sundown.
Specify the location where you’ll be meeting.
Be sure to include the link to your volunteer sign-up sheet.
Tell people to bring their own prayer books or to download and print out their own prayer sheets (Kabbalat Shabbat | Shabbat Meal).
If the space is not terribly well-lit, let folks know who are non-halakhic to bring flashlights or headlamps to read by.
Let people know your event is open to non-Jewish observers and participants.
Invite every Jew you know in your local area! Ask your friends who say ‘Yes’ to invite their friends as well.
Share the event with Facebook and Google groups frequented by Jews in your local community.
Reach out to progressive Jewish congregations and Jewish social justice organizations in your community and ask them to partner with or promote your event.
Share the event on your local occupation’s Facebook page, as well as tweeting it at them.
Post your event to the Occupy Judaism Facebook page and tweet it at us as well. Use the hashtag #occupyshabbat.
Let your local Jewish newspaper and blogs know!
Consider having an email sign-up sheet the day of your event for people who are comfortable writing on Shabbat. Try to have a clipboard handy.
If your event is a success, consider building on the momentum by setting up an Occupy Judaism Facebook or Google group for your local community. Use the group to plan future actions: those that bring more Jews out to your local occupation and those that bring the values of the occupation back to your Jewish community.
Consider having members of your group join the working group at your local occupation that deals with outreach to the spiritual/religious community.
Have your group’s key organizers join the Occupy Judaism National Working Group (which is far less daunting than it sounds). Email us at info at occupyjudaism dot org.
Source is here

From a local list serve. This seems to be a new phase.

Looking for a magician (or similar type of entertainment) to perform at an upsherin for children.

Interesting series of mini-interviews at Moment. Here are four of my favorites.

THE ORIGINS OF JEWISH CREATIVITY
Moment Talks With Artists, Scientists and Scholars to Illuminate the Source of Human Creativity

David Brooks

The dominant theory about creativity is that it is the result of the blending of two different idea networks. The classic example is Picasso, who took the idea network of the Western artistic tradition and the idea network of African masks—not just their physical look but the spirituality implied by them—and jammed them together like two galaxies crashing. That’s how it works: Two networks crash, and out of the ensuing clashes, conflicts, congruences, you spin off new things. So creativity is very rarely inventing something new out of whole cloth; it’s using two or more old things to create new combinations. The theory of why Jews are so accomplished has to do with them living in what one historian calls “verges”—spots where different cultures come together, whether it’s Jerusalem, Istanbul, Baghdad or New York, places with a lot of traders, a lot of coming and going, where ideas are clashing. And then as Jews we’ve got our own experience of our minority culture clashing with whatever majority culture we’re living in—whether Christian or something else. That gives us the ideal space for new things to come in. It gives you a Saul Bellow, for instance, mixing his Jewish heritage with the tough guy culture of Chicago, so he ends up with a sensibility that’s part Chicago tough guy and part Talmudic intellectual. That’s my theory.

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and the author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.

Gerald Schroeder

Einstein said it perfectly: Religion without science is blind. A Jewish mystic said that when the Torah came into the world, it was split in two parts—one part was given on Sinai and the other part is nature. Creativity arises from wonder, from being amazed at the magnificence of the world—wondering what’s underlying all the amazing complexity we see all around us. Judaism favors asking questions, whereas some religions expect you to take everything on faith. The very fact that Jews ask questions means they’re being creative because they’re wondering how things work. Doubting isn’t against our faith; for me, doubting is part of it. Doubting is trying to understand how the world works. The subtlety of biblical text itself encourages trying to understand its deeper meaning, looking below the surface to understand what’s really there. Creativity is digging below the surface and finding what’s under the superficial world we see. And in this sense, I think Moses was creative because he realized that God wants arguments.

Gerald Schroeder is a physicist and also teaches at Aish HaTorah College of Jewish Studies. He is author of four books, including The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom.

Daniel Matt

The Zohar, the foundational text of kabbalah, is a celebration of creativity—it shows how the Torah endlessly unfolds in meaning. Jacob ben-Sheshet Gerondi, a 13th century kabbalist, said it’s a mitzvah for every wise person to innovate in Torah according to his capacity. That’s refreshing because you often hear the traditional notion, to accept what’s been handed down or to learn from the master because you’re not able to create on your own. But ben-Sheshet says (after conveying one of his innovations), “If I hadn’t invented it in my mind I would say that this was transmitted to Moses at Mt. Sinai.” He’s aware that his interpretation is new, but he thinks it harmonizes with the ultimate source of tradition—the creative work itself is somehow deeply connected to an ancient mainstream. An essential component of all creativity is tapping into something deeper than your normal state of mind.

The basic approach of the rabbis is to apply midrash to reading the Torah—the rabbis are willing to be very bold in their interpretation. It’s natural for a Jew to be bold and innovative—that’s the secret to keeping the tradition alive. The Zohar reads the very opening words of the Torah radically. Instead of “In the beginning God created,” it’s “In the beginning the Infinite created God.” It sounds bizarre to say that God is the object of creation, but I think the meaning is that what we think of as God doesn’t do justice to the true nature of God, which they call ein sof, “without end.” Going beyond traditional midrash, the Zohar employs radical creativity to make us question our current assumptions about life, about the nature of the human being, about God and spirituality. It moves through the Torah verse by verse asking probing, challenging questions. As the Zohar says, “God is known and grasped to the degree that one opens the gates of imagination,” so it’s up to our imaginative faculty to understand reality, or the reality of God.

Daniel Matt served for 20 years as a professor of Jewish spirituality at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He is currently composing a multi-volume annotated translation of the Zohar, entitled The Zohar: Pritzker Edition.

Daniel Boyarin

The Babylonian Talmud is the most extraordinary creation of the Jewish people—it speaks a kind of manic energy and records that extraordinary energy and vitality from the areas where it was produced in the Babylonian Diaspora. Jews were imbued with creative energy through the intense study of this one peculiar vibrant work through the centuries. Sholom Aleichem, for example, records how the world of talmudic learning was diffused from the yeshiva throughout Jewish communities across class and gender. While the making of the Talmud was a creative act, so was the Jewish openness to many cultures: The cross-fertilization between ancient Jewish tradition and the outside world led to the taking in of new ideas and energy. Since the 19th century, much of Jewish creativity has stemmed from being in two cultures at the same time. Being in a position to observe a culture that you are also a part of is very conducive to creativity.

Daniel Boyarin, Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California Berkeley, has written extensively on the Talmud and gender studies.
Read the Rest Here

H/T Theophrastus at BLT

Here is a snippet from Living In a Post-Moral World Sermon for Parshat Noach delivered by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein
October 29, 2011

And lest you think that this phenomenon is out there and has nothing to do with your world and my world, I actually found this problem this September in my sex ethics class in the 10th Grade at Ramaz. I gave the students an assignment to read an article about something quite grotesque: it described a group of Jewish married couples who gather periodically and engage in what is popularly called swinging, that is, spouse swapping. A sort of round robin sexual orgy. I asked them how many of you think that this is wrong? And only a few students raised their hands. Astonished, I asked them how could they not think that this was wrong. I got answers like: “well, since it is all out in the open and everybody knows that everybody is doing it, there is nothing fundamentally wrong. No one is cheating on a spouse because the spouse was also swinging.”

I said to them: “what about the seventh commandment – do not commit adultery.” One student answered that these people are really not religious. What the students didn’t seem to understand was that whether they were religious or not, there is a moral code that is rooted in the Bible which defines for us what is right and what is wrong. The problem is that when pressed, many of the students simply said that if it feels good and if it feels right then who am I to judge? I told them I wasn’t suggesting that they go over to somebody who is engaged in swinging and chastise them, but that they had to
have an opinion on this practice. They looked at me with some disbelief. Now, please understand, these are good kids. I don’t for one minute believe that they will engage in this kind of debauchery when they are married adults. This is not related to what they are doing or will do; this is simply an indication that these children are not thinking in moral categories and that they feel that it is somehow politically incorrect to judge another’s behavioral choices. They are picking up from society in general a reluctance to judge.

I confess that I was so disturbed about their reaction that I spent much of the course, which is actually ending next week, coming back to this subject again and again in order to show them how far they have wandered intellectually from the religious sources in which they believe. These are children who follow the Torah which tells them to keep Shabbat, Kashrut and Yom Tov and to pray. They all do these things. But they don’t seem to understand that the same Torah is the source of our moral values, and morality is not simply a matter of opinion. God gave the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai not the Ten Suggestions ! Morality is not personal; it is ultimately ordained by a higher authority. Read the Rest Here

Thoughts?
Just a reminder to send me sermons notable for social history or theology.

h/t ASC

Another great entry in the freq.uenci.es: a collaborative genealogy of spirituality project is the entry Law School. If asked to situate spirituality, many tend to imagine a new age book shop or yoga studio-not law school. This essay cuts right to the correct cultural situations that generate spirituality by focusing on law school.

According to this entry, people in law school can feel repressed and needed something beyond and aspirational, something to give meaning to life. Spirituality offers the redemption and meaning in life. A spirituality that is not other worldly, but one that focuses on the real issues in life is most helpful, such as Evangelicals or Centrist Orthodoxy. One can now feel that one is practicing a religious approach to the legal career or religious advocacy. The religious conviction gives one a sense of that one’s work has a moral dimension.

To put it in broader and less urbane terms, If you gave someone a choice of becoming a doctor, lawyer or accountant, and they fell trapped by the choice. The acceptance of Centrist Orthodoxy transforms the life into one of meaning and moral order. If one finds law school a track of value-less careerism, cut-throat ethics, and dehumanizing tedium, then the leap into the halakhic covenental community conveys a sense of meaning to this activity. One’s moral sensitivity and community values come from one’s religious community. That personal need for evangelicalism or Centrism is spirituality. The author uses as his moral exemplar the progressive lawyer-theologian William Stingfellow (d. 1985) who showed how relgion makes a difference in one’s legal career. But for many this epiphany will just be pixie dust sprinkled over a value-less dehumanizing career, providing more solace than ethics.

It is worth noting that even though the article uses Christian and Pauline references, the author was associated with the Jewish law project at Cordozo.

Law School –Jeremy Kessler
When I began law school in 2008, both evangelicalism and law school attendance were on the rise in the United States. Though these trends generally got covered in different corners of the newspaper, I came to suspect a secret connection. A year or two at a fine American law school can leave the most hard-bitten among us longing for rebirth. St. Paul once wrote: “For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” It will come as no surprise to even the most unbiblical law student that Paul was once an attorney himself. Law school can cramp, as stilted policy discussions and four-hour exams chock full of outlandish narratives of wrongdoing seem unequal to the pleasures and pain of being human. Who we are gets buried beneath what we do. Pressed upon by prescribed forms, the doubtful legal journeyman or woman longs to break on through, to speak in tongues, to be born again.

Thanks to Paul, law students can rely on a strong precedent should they have a change of heart. If my generation seems to have a particular passion for law school, that may disguise a deeper passion for conversion.

In the complaints of the soon-to-be-professional, there always remains a glimmer of expectancy: Perhaps I will be transformed. Perhaps the law is not the final form my life will take—it may only be the shaping flame. Such a wayfarer takes the bar and trusts in grace.

Betting on epiphany is an old American tradition.

William Stringfellow, a great American lawyer and theologian, offered plenty of ammunition to the spiritually-dissatisfied law student. Yet he also criticized the flight from reality that frequently accompanies frustration with legal drudgery

“Contemporary spirituality,” he explained, could only offer cheap escape from the here-and-now, not an alternative response to the human complexity with which legal systems must struggle. Where both legal education and contemporary spirituality went wrong, in his mind, was their idolization of personal efficacy at the expense of the true effectiveness of the Word of God.

Throughout his life, Stringfellow contrasted “legal” advocacy with “biblical” advocacy, and “contemporary” spirituality with “biblical” spirituality. Biblical advocacy and biblical spirituality were really one and the same thing—a form of politics that recognized God as the only legitimate actor on the world stage.

A new movement called “religious lawyering” is looking to bring something like Stringfellow’s biblical outlook to the halls of law schools and governments nationwide. The trans-denominational movement emerged in the 1990s, and there are now several professional organizations (such as the Christian Legal Society and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists) and institutes at Pepperdine and Fordham Law Schools devoted to integrating individual faith with legal practice. No longer does Paul need to leave his career behind. Religious lawyers, however, are not missionaries; they do not seek to propagate religious observance through their legal work. Rather, they hope to bring the moral sensitivity they cherish in their faith traditions to the complex human relationships that structure their professional lives.

In the words of one of the movement’s eloquent defenders, the law professor Robert Vischer, “The concrete differences religious lawyering will make will tend to involve relational differences—i.e., seeing the client not simply as a source of predetermined legal instructions, but as a fellow human faced with circumstances brimming with moral significance.”
Although a legal education can serve the young crusader well, it is better at inducing spiritual crises than resolving them. Read the rest here.

Currently, there is a wonderful online project jointly run by the immanent frame and killing the Buddha, the former the leading religion in the social sciences blog and the latter one of the leading religious essay online journals. The project is called freq.uenci.es: a collaborative genealogy of spirituality. It is a patchwork of first thoughts on evaluating and contextualizing the current use of the word spirituality. It is quite urbane, educated, and subtle. The project will have 100 short essays; currently they are up to essay number forty. Many of them are quite good.

I will post about several of the essays. I will start with the essay enthusiasm by Harvard Divinity School Prof Amy Hollywood.
I start with this one because people have lost the distinction between enthusiasm and schwarmer and have lost the sense of the dangers of enthusiasm. It is especially important because of the current turn to ruah and enflaming emotions in day schools, youth movements, and year in Israel. A decade ago, at an Orthodox forum on spirituality the important plenary speaker (as well as many of the minor speakers) considered enthusiasm as benign, harmless, and able to be confined by the normative. I was sitting next to Walter Wurzburger and the two of us repeatedly asked our joint question: What of the dangers of enthusiasm? Hume, Kant, Hegel as well as Mendelssohn and Krokhmal took time out of their philosophy to discuss the dangers of enthusiasm. It was as if no one had ever heard of the dangers. In Hasidic literature, the Mittler rebbe distinguishes real devekut from hearing from afar – where one works oneself up emotionally.

Amy Hollywood in her essay enthusiasm returns to these questions as a background by which to understand contemporary spirituality.

In German, there are two words—three even. Enthusiasmus, like the English enthusiasm, is rooted in the Greek “en theos,” to have the god within, to be inspired by god or the gods. But Enthusiasmus was inadequate to contain the sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther’s rage against those who purported to receive direct divine inspiration. For them, he coined the term Schwärmer, from the verb schwärmen, to swarm, as in the swarming of bees.

To be a Schwärmer, most often translated as enthusiast or fanatic, was to be ungovernable by either human or God.

In his essay “Superstition and Enthusiasm” (1741), the philosopher David Hume argues that enthusiasm is a disorder of the imagination, “an unaccountable elevation and presumption, proceeding from prosperous success, from luxuriant health, from strong spirits, or from bold and confident disposition

In the “strong spirits” that gave rise to enthusiasm, Hume argued, the imagination is given free reign, giving rise to “raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy.” The enfettered person may eventually take leave of all of her faculties and attribute her own fancies “to the immediate inspiration of the Divine Being who is the object of devotion.”

It is just here that the danger of enthusiasm lies, for if left unchecked:
the inspired person comes to regard himself as the chief favorite of the Divinity; and when this frenzy once takes place, which is the summit of enthusiasm, every whimsy is consecrated: human reason, and even morality are rejected as fallacious guides: and the fanatic madman delivers himself over, blindly, and without reserve, to the supposed illapses of the spirit, and to inspirations from above.

All of this marks the negative light in which Hume, like most of his enlightened peers, saw claims to direct divine inspiration, prophetic states, or rapturous trances. To be an enthusiast was decidedly not a good thing.

Even those among the religious who claimed to experience God in some direct way carefully demarcated themselves from the enthusiasts–or at least from the wrong kind of enthusiasts. Hume’s contemporary, John Wesley, argued that if enthusiasm was taken to mean “a divine impulse or impression, superior to all the natural faculties,” which for a brief time suspends reason and the other senses, then: “both the Prophets of old, and the Apostles, were proper enthusiasts; being, at divers times, so filled with the Spirit, and so influenced by Him who dwelt in their hearts.”

But this, Wesley notes, is not what most of his contemporaries meant by enthusiasm. Instead, they meant by it a kind of madness, a specifically religious madness, in which the sound mind preserved by true religion was destroyed. The enthusiast, for Wesley, is the person who believes he has grace when he does not, or who understands herself to be a Christian when she is not.

Enthusiasm is a kind of self-deception against which Wesley must warn those to whom he preaches. For Wesley the criteria for distinguishing between what we might call true and false enthusiasm, or between true religion and enthusiasm, are themselves spiritual. They are available only to those who have experienced God in their hearts. In the words of the historian Ann Taves, for Wesley, “if one could not see the distinction, one by definition had not had the experience.”
This emphasis on spiritual knowledge and the sort of circular reasoning to which it seemed to give rise is precisely the kind of thing against which Hume and his enlightenment colleagues argued.

So Hume goes on to explain that although his “first reflection is, that religions, which partake of enthusiasm are, on their first rise, much more furious and violent than those which partake of superstition,” he goes on to argue that over time, such religions become “much more gentle and moderate.” In their boldness and resoluteness, enthusiasts refuse to be beholden to others—and in particular to priests. They have “contempt of forms, traditions, and authorities” that Hume seems positively to admire. The superstitious, on the other hand, in the intensity of their fearful melancholy, turn to others for guidance, giving themselves over willingly to the authority of priests and religious institutions.
Read the rest here.

At her academic homepage, she has an essay that looks like a prior chapter to the above essay since it asks the prior questions and answers using medieval texts. Moderns are looking for self and medieval contemplatives are looking to internalize the text.Those interested in Neo-hasidism are already committed to the individual over the internalization.

Running like a thread throughout all these debates—theological, antitheological, historical, philosophical, and those pursued in the interdisciplinary study of religion—lies the attempt to distinguish true from false, sincere from insincere, supernaturally from naturally caused religious or spiritual experience (the terms may differ, but the general point remains the same). With these distinctions comes the recurrent presumption that genuine religious experience is immediate, spontaneous, personal, and affective and, as such, potentially at odds with religious institutions and their texts, beliefs, and rituals. As a number of scholars of religion—as well as Christian theologians—have recently shown, the danger in these discussions is that they miss the ways in which, for many religious traditions, ancient texts, beliefs, and rituals do not replace experience as the vital center of spiritual life, but instead provide the means for engendering it.

Yet, for Benedict, as for Cassian on whose work he liberally drew, the intensity and authenticity of one’s feeling for God is enabled through communal, ritualized prayer, as well as through private reading and devotion (itself carefully regulated).9 Proper performance of “God’s work” in the liturgy requires that the monk not simply recite the Psalms. Instead, the monk was called on to feel what the psalmist felt, to learn to fear, desire, and love God in and through the words of the Psalms themselves. For Cassian, we know God, love God, and experience God when our experience and that of the Psalmist come together:

To many contemporary readers, however, there might still seem to be something profoundly different between medieval conceptions of spiritual experience and their own. Even among the growing number of Americans who understand certain kinds of practice—meditation, prayer, and devotional reading among them—as essential to their spiritual experience, there is a suspicion of the particular form such practices take within Christianity and other religious traditions. I suspect that what is at issue here is the association of experience itself, and spiritual experience in particular, with what, for lack of a better word, I will call individualism.

A series of common questions seem to underlie many people’s conception of spiritual experience. How am I to have my own experience of the divine? How can I experience the divine personally, and isn’t such a desire rendered impossible within the framework of institutions that direct my understanding and experience of God? What happens to that aspect of my experience that is irreducible to anyone else’s? On the one hand, many who consider themselves spiritual understand their spirituality in terms of an attunement with nature or spirit—something that is bigger than and lies beyond the boundaries of themselves. Yet, on the other hand, there is a keen desire for this experience to be one’s own. What the medieval monk or nun whose ritual performances I have described here strives to attain is an experience of God that is in conformity with that of the Psalmist and other scriptural authors. The experience must become one’s own, and Bernard insists on the continued specificity of the individual soul. Yet, at the same time, to be a true Christian is to share in a common experience of God. Read the rest here.