Sublime

the quest to disseminate mystical knowledge within an intellectualist framework, thereby forging a synthesis of the ecstatic and the scientific, the mystical and the philosophical.

this act of enclothing (hitlabbeshut), epitomized in the zoharic sentiment that God and Torah are one, is the kabbalistic way of articulating the theopoetic mystery of incarnation, the paradox of the delimitation of the limitless, the ideational underpinning of the hal-akhic basis for the mystical ideal of devequt, communion with and conjunction to

The mythopoeic axiom that God and Torah are identical—so central to the kabbalistic imaginary—presupposes that disparate matters are juxtaposed in the (dis)semblance of the name incarnate. In that respect, the Torah as primordial parable points to the inherent metaphoricity of language, the convergence of the literal and the figurative.

the talmudic dictum that one must get so inebriated on Purim that it is no longer possible to discern the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordecai.”49 Just as the consumption of wine on the physical plane brings about the nullification of the senses (biṭṭul ha-ḥushim), so, in the spiritual plane, the disclosure of secrets can l

the study of Ḥabad requires a hermeneutic based on a notion of time at odds with the linear conception under-girding this comment.

The negativity that doubly binds God and world yields what we may also call acosmic naturalism. The adjective acosmic connotes that there is no world that is not enfolded in the essence that is the light of the Infinite, whereas the noun naturalism indicates that there is no unfolding without the enfolded, no manifestation but in the occlusion that

the conjunction of the Jew to the light of Ein Sof, a monopsychic state that summons the eradication of ontic difference, biṭṭul ha-yesh, a blurring of the boundary between finite and infinite.91

From this assumption there follows the further one that both genders are circumscribed in a closed circle of nondifferentiation—to be contrasted with an open circle of indifference—much like the serpent eating its tail, according to the archaic mythological image. A critical and influential formulation of this ideal is the zoharic description of th