Through a Speculum That Shines

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant but very dense book
Review: I rate this book a 10 in academic brilliance but only a 3 in presentation. There is no doubt that Dr.Elliot Wolfson is a world class scholar in the field of Jewish Mysticism. However I had to wind my way through extremely dense scholarship to get at the material. I unfortunately find this to be an annoying trait of most books in this genre... Overall I rate this book highly and would recommend it... but be prepared to invest the time and effort...

Rating:
Summary: Good Scholarly Work
Review: This book reminds me a lot of the works of Gershom Scholem and, to some degree, of Moshe Idel. It is a scholarly work and, thus, not easy reading. But, the author makes many interesting points and has some translations (perhaps, the best part for the more advanced student). Thus, it's more a book about Kabbalah than a book of Kabbalah. Nevertheless, a mystic needs to keep his/her feet on the ground as well as his/her head in the clouds. I find a mixture of theory and practice books is optimal for maintaining balanced growth and progress. A flavor of the book can be had by reading some quotations I've added to me collection: p. 326 "Mystical experience, like experience in general, is contextual. If that is the case, it follows that mystical visions will always be shaped, informed, and determined by one's institutional affiliations. The claim that vision is conditioned by pre-experiential criteria renders the very notion of an immediate visionary experience of God or things divine problematic, if not possible."

p. 328 "Indeed, within the midrashic imagination, broadly defined, there is no hard-and-fast line in the traditional vernacular of the rabbis separating text for exegesis, written from oral Torah. The blurring of boundaries is evident at both ends: the base text or revelation is thought to comprise within itself layers of interpretation, and the works of interpretation on the biblical canon are considered revelatory in nature. To cite Bruns* again, the rabbis `imagined themselves as part of the whole, participating in Torah rather than operating on it as an analytic distance..' Interpretation, therefore, can be viewed as an effort to reconstitute the original experience of revelation." * Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern Gerald Bruns Yale Univ. Press, CT, 1992 pp. 109-110, 115, and 637

p. 328 quoting Daniel Boyatin, "The Eye of the Torah" `ocular desire is the Midrashic Hermaneutic." From Critical Inquiry 16 (1990) pp. 532-50

pp. 534 & 541 (ibid.) `the memory of having seen God in the Bible and the desire to have that experience again was a vital part of Rabbinic religion. They constitute, moreover, a key element in the study of Torah, the making of Midrash.'


Rating:
Summary: Speculum is an excellent analysis of kabbalah.
Review: While it is a challenging read, I found Speculum to be both a careful reading of the texts, and an excellent analysis of the issue at hand - vision in Jewish mystical texts. Fortunately (and quite surprisingly in this field), Wolfson neither glosses over anything, nor exaggerates anything. Rather, he presents it in a balanced, yet brilliant manner. If there was one book to read about Jewish mysticism, this is it.