Sublime

Analyst Jeffrey Raff designates encounters with spirits and the dead to the psychoid realm, which can be defined as an objective unconscious with transpersonal elements.

Judaism came to say that beneath this appearance of conflict, multiplicity, and caprice there was a oneness, a singularity, all-powerful and endlessly compassionate, endlessly just.

the innermost element of secrecy entails the expansion of consciousness, designated by the technical term da‘at, which I rendered as “mindfulness,” to the point that the soul is bound to the Infinite, a prolepsis of the messianic future.

We are not the first to connect these two lights—the primordial light of creation and the Hanukkah light. The rabbis of the Kabala, the Jewish mystical tradition, claimed that these lights were one and the same, that the light we contemplate on Hanukkah is in fact the Or Genuzah (literally, “the light that was stored away”), the primordial light of

the ultimate objective of esoteric learning is not to cultivate rational comprehension but to foster the obliteration of self,12 the modality of study involves the power of reason, and thus the term intellectual mysticism seems to me a fitting expression to characterize the orientation of the seventh Rebbe.

Ambivalence spells the end of an identity because it cannot be passed on to our children. They will seek, for their own psychic health, to escape from it; and that in effect is what a whole generation is doing by leaving Judaism.

Having ascended to heaven, Elijah does not remain there constantly, awaiting his messianic mission; he returns to earth ahead of time, frequently—to save those in danger, fight for justice, champion the innocent, heal the sick, gladden the miserable, fortify the weak, and stimulate both the wicked and the average to engage in teshuvah

The compiler of the Yalkut Shim’oni collected in the thirteenth century the old Aggadahs which, as preserved by the Midrashic literature, accompanied the biblical text. In the Yalkut Reubeni, on the other hand, we have a collection of the Aggadic output of the Kabbalists during five centuries.

The other great cluster of commands—known as edot, or “testimonies”—have to do with our identity as part of a people and its story. So