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ACCESSION NO: AAI9987381 TITLE Kabbalistic foundations of Jewish spiritual practice: Rabbi Ezra of Gerona. On the kabbalistic meaning of the Mizvot AUTHOR Travis, Yakov M.; DEGREE PhD SCHOOL BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY DATE 2002 PAGES 409 ADVISER Green, Arthur ISBN 0-493-59910-X SOURCE DAI-A 63/03, p. 997, Sep 2002 SUBJECT RELIGION, HISTORY OF (0320); LITERATURE, MEDIEVAL (0297); THEOLOGY (0469) Abstract: This dissertation is a critical Hebrew edition, annotated English translation, and detailed study of Rabbi Ezra ben Solomon of Gerona's kabbalistic exposition on the meaning of the biblical commandments (early thirteenth-century). Rabbi Ezra's text is a major component of his classic, <italic>Commentary on Song of Songs</italic>, erroneously ascribed to Nahmanides. Rabbi Ezra was a pioneer in popularizing Kabbalah and his exposition on the commandments was the first in what became a major genre in Kabbalah literature. Research drawing from this text has been based on faulty versions. The present critical edition corrects this problem, providing a base for future studies. The annotated translation traces key sources and parallels, as well as the text's impact on later literature, while addressing many issues pertaining to kabbalistic conceptions of spiritual practice. The introductory chapters and appendices illuminate: (a); the literary foundations and early evolution of Kabbalah, and (b); the conceptual foundations of early kabbalistic spirituality. This study presents the most detailed account to date of the Gerona fellowship of Kabbalists and Rabbi Ezra's pivotal role in the early thirteenth-century explosion of Geronese kabbalistic writings. It substantiates the view that this eruption was largely in response to the rationalistic writings on the commandments by the twelfth-century philosopher, Maimonides, and it demonstrates that Rabbi Ezra privileged rabbinic <italic>aggadot</italic> over esoteric texts when citing sources for his teachings. Analysis of key texts also reconfirms Rabbi Ezra's deep influence on the kabbalistic writings of Nahmanides. Academic research on Jewish mysticism has tended to neglect the centrality of the biblical commandments and rabbinic ritual. This study systematically delineates both the contours of the kabbalistic cosmos in which the commandments are grounded, as well as the inner structures and functions of commandment-centered kabbalistic spirituality as expressed by Rabbi Ezra and his contemporaries. This work thus contributes to the field of Kabbalah in the areas of text criticism, historiography, thought, and phenomenology. PUBLICATION NUMBER AAT 3045915
ACCESSION NO.: AAG1391692
FOLLOWING TITLES LISTED IN 1999
ACCESSION NO.: AAG9706265 TITLE: EACH MAN ATE AN ANGEL'S MEAL: EATING AND EMBODIMENT IN THE "ZOHAR" (JEWISH, MYSTICISM) AUTHOR: HECKER, JOEL DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1996 INSTITUTION: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY; 0146 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 57-09A, Page 3988, 00410 Pages DESCRIPTORS: RELIGION, HISTORY OF ABSTRACT: Recent kabbalah scholarship has studied the Zohar with an eye to understanding the mystical experience enjoyed and mystical techniques employed by its mystical authors. Eating, like all human activities, is invested with symbolic significance and is bounded by the cultural constraints, goals, and ideal images that try to order, sanctify, or aestheticize this basic biological need. This study examines the symbolic meanings and phenomenology of eating as an aspect of the constructed embodiment within the kabbalistic ethos, as portrayed in the Zohar. Alongside spiritual experiences located primarily in the soul, other parts of the body, specifically the stomach and inward parts, also serve as locations for these experiences. Mystical experiences associated with eating express a psychosomatic unity: spiritual experiences are located in the body and spiritual experience is expressed bodily. Mystical satiation and the consumption of idealized foods induce experiences of devequt; enhanced hermeneutical skills; apotropaic protection: theurgic instrumentality; eugenic potency; and bodily purification. To gain these experiences, the kabbalists symbolically consume idealized foods through imaginative dining on their own food or through their hermeneutic engagement with the biblical and rabbinic texts. This analysis considers the bodily practices associated with meals that serve wittingly, as techniques, and unwittingly, providing a physical environment for dining rituals performed with mystical intent. The topography of the body is found to be ideally a body of fullness, whose boundaries are sufficiently permeable to allow for the intake of divine energy, and for the outward overflow of fruitfulness, but also sufficiently closed to suggest completeness, as the perfect symbol for the Divine. A spatio-temporal continuity of the body, allows for unions between the kabbalistic devotee and his food, table, chair, and wine, as well as with his fellow. The diner in the Zohar consumes food of the material world as an avenue to uncovering mystical heights that lie behind it. In eating, the body is assimilated to the Divine even as it partakes of the world in the most material manner. The abyss between spirit and matter is thus vitiated as space is created for spirit in the midst of the stomach. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9727451 TITLE: MYSTICAL SYMBOLISM IN TERESA OF AVILA AND CLASSICAL KABBALAH (SPAIN, SIXTEENTH CENTURY, JEWISH, MARKAVAH, ABRAHAM ABULAFIA, ZOHAR, SHA'ARE ORAH) AUTHOR: BURGESON, SUJAN JANE DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: GRADUATE THEOLOGICAL UNION; 0080 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-03A, Page 0856, 00301 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE; RELIGION, HISTORY OF ABSTRACT: This dissertation is a study of mystical symbolism in Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila as compared and contrasted to three aspects of Jewish mysticism: the Merkavah tradition, the ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia, and the theosophical Kabbalah of the Zohar and Sha'are Orah. It reviews the possible sources of symbolism in the life of Teresa of Avila, including her Converso background and the social, political, and religious climate of sixteenth-century Spain. Interior Castle describes Teresa's spiritual quest and process of interior prayer through the symbolism of an inner castle with seven mansions. This work explores the archetypal nature of the spiritual quest as a pattern of consciousness in Interior Castle, noting symbolic resonances in the seven palaces of the Merkavah quest, Abulafia's seven stages of meditation in ecstatic Kabbalah, and the pattern of emanation and ascension in the ten sefirot of Theosophical Kabbalah. ACCESSION NO.: AAI9526964 TITLE: 'OHNE ZAHL SIND DIE STRASSEN': WEGE IN DIE DICHTUNG PAUL CELANS (GERMAN TEXT, JEWISH, MYSTICISM) AUTHOR: BEHL, HEIKE KRISTINA DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1995 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO; 0033 ADVISER: Chair: JAMES K. LYON SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 56-04A, Page 1374, 00286 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, GERMANIC LANGUAGE: German ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines how strongly Celan's poems and their interpretation depend on a tight network of references between the poems, scientific discourses, different languages, in particular Hebrew, and Jewish mysticism. The multiple references add--often very concrete--meaning(s) to the individual words and thus blur the distinction between literal meaning and metaphorical meaning. The first chapter looks at the similarity between Celan's comments on the multi-valent meanings of his words and a linguistic study by Edna Aphek and Yishai Tobin on the use of multi-valent word systems. Both use the same analogies of crystal structures with different intersecting levels and axes, and the prismatic effects of light deflection on crystals. The comparison leads to the thesis that, since Celan's poems use word systems extensively, one has to consider their crystal-like structure with a number of different parallel levels of references in order to do his complex language justice. These levels include different scientific discourses as well as the etymology of words and languages such as Hebrew. The second chapter supports the validity of the terminology and method established in the first chapter by the interpretation of the poem "Kleide die Worthohlen aus"--an 'instructional' poem, that tells the reader how to read poems and to work with language. Apart from references to crystallography and the use of different languages, the poem furthermore alludes to the 32 different ways employed by Jewish scholars to extract the many meanings hidden in sacred texts, the so-called 32 Ways of Wisdom. The third chapter shows in a detailed analysis of the poem "Engfuhrung" the importance of the many levels of reference for a comprehensive interpretation of the poem. The levels most important for this and most of Celan's poems are the Holocaust (with its aftermath for Jewish and non-Jewish survivors), the communicative function of language (with the problem of how to speak about the unspeakable Holocaust), Jewish mysticism, and the different earth sciences such as crystallography and biology. The fourth and last chapter explores hidden levels of reference in several more poems as a starting point for an in-depth analysis. It furthermore opens up the research in the direction of Freud's terminology used for the analysis of dreams, which similarly tries to extract more meanings from under the surface. Freud's terms of 'manifest' versus 'latent' meaning, "Verschiebung," "Verdichtung," and "Knotenpunkt" suggest concepts similar to the crystallographic terms used by Celan. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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