Sublime

Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. The world will not receive truth in any other way. – GOSPEL OF PHILIP

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.

Thus, the Holocaust brought to an end the period of Galut Judaism.

Rabbi Saadia Gaon teaches that “the Jews are a people by virtue of Torah.”

Ḥabad messianism, which reached a climactic pitch in Schneerson, is a form of enlightened consciousness—a soterial recasting of the biblical mandate to know the name—that entails an illumination in space and time from the infinity that is beyond space and time and in virtue of which the spatial and temporal coordinates of the world are nullified in

become Judaism’s most controversial proposition: that since mankind in its diversity cannot be reduced to a single image, so God cannot be reduced to a single faith or language. God exists in difference and thus chooses as His witness a people dedicated to difference.

For Jews, the journey to paradise is a journey of interpretation.

The Exodus teaches us that history is not an eternal recurrence—ever repeating but never progressing—but a time stream with direction. History is not a meaningless cycle but the path along which the Divine-human partnership is operating to perfect the world. Time is linear, not merely circular; all humans are walking toward the end time when the fi

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