Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

the error of assuming that kabbalah and Ḥasidism are “one entity expressed in different forms.” In an effort to correct this miscalculation, he explained that the former is the study of esoteric matters by a limited group of people, the elect (yeḥidei segullah) of a given generation, whereas the latter is about publicizing these secrets to afford e

Just as Jung equates the “inner experience of individuation” with what the mystics name “the experience of God”—the “smallest power” confronting the “greatest power,” the “smallest space” containing the “infinite”—so we can think of Schneerson becoming an “in-dividual,” that is, a “separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole,’”89 the individuated point t

In the words of theologian Rabbi Jakob Petuchowski, “Literary history cannot solve the questions asked by Theology; and the question as to the fact of Revelation is a theological question.”

Torah, like koan study, often reveals itself to us precisely when we come to the limits of our own powers, our capacity to coerce an answer from it by dint of our rationality. This insight had seemed to come upon me from the outside, first as a glimmer of light from the Torah and then as an explosion of it.