This panel investigates multiple sites of meaning-making in Jewish thought, politics, and culture, from rituals and ceremonies in late antiquity to modern mystical discourses. The first paper views rabbinic literature within the context of late antique Greco-Roman medicine to ask how we might apply the “bio-looping” model of therapeutic intervention to rabbinic conceptions of embodiment. The second paper attends to midrash as an expressive practice of speech that affectively forms both public rhetorical culture and the individual political subjects within it. The third paper addresses medieval kabbalistic approaches to historical misfortune as cosmological attempts to position Jews as proactive agents of world-historical events. The fourth paper views the politics of mysticism through the lens of Jewish cultural history to consider the complexities of modern liberal political discourses. Taken together, these papers illuminate Jewish textual, affective, and political entanglements in order to shed new light on existing cultural and religious categories.
Religious healing has long been a subject of interest in both the sciences and humanities disciplines. How do rituals, prayers, and ceremonies—meaning-making experiences without an obvious western biomedical intervention—lead to real therapeutic results including pain relief, remission, and recovery from illness? This paper draws on the "bio-looping"model of embodiment to examine the connection between meaning-making activities and health in late antique Palestinian rabbinic literature. Situation these texts within the context of late antique Greco-Roman medicine, this paper will explore the rabbinic conception of embodiment developed in these texts.
While scholarship in Jewish thought and beyond has attended to the literary aspects of midrash, midrash as a practice of speech which forms a public rhetorical culture and individual subjects within it has not been thoroughly explored. This paper approaches the topic through the lens of democratic theory on public discourse, with specific attention to critical scholarship on affect. By analyzing the phenomenology of midrashic interpretation through the writings of Avivah Zornberg and Michael Fishbane, this paper argues that performing midrash allows a subject to be indulgent regarding desires and passions—to imagine particular narratives and publicize them expressively—while still developing the humility required for a collective discursive project. In this way, midrashic rhetoric offers a model for rethinking current conversations around the ethics of citizenship in political speech, as they struggle to square the liberal demands of accountability to a public and the demands of the affective subject.
Medieval kabbalists devoted significant energy to explaining historical misfortunes. This paper will describe how medieval kabbalists used the image of the sarim, or heavenly archons of the nations, to explain Jewish subjugation to Christian and Muslim nations, and how they understood gilgul, or reincarnation, as the hidden mechanism whereby Jewish souls carry out their secret mission over the course of multiple lifetimes across the long arc of Israel’s exile. And finally, mention will be made of the ways that kabbalistic texts situated these strategies for reading Jewish history within a macro-historical concept of multiple successive worlds, according to which the present world is the most difficult of all possible manifestations of the cosmos. This paper will argue that the strategies evident in these discourses, despite their focus on negative historical events, suggest that medieval kabbalists sought to imagine Jews as the proactive agents of world history.
In recent decades, Leigh Eric Schmidt and others have demonstrated the extent to which modern mystical discourse has reflected not only Protestant sensibilities but also the modern project of liberalism. In this paper, I examine the politics of mysticism through a lens of Jewish cultural history in order to shed new light on both the category of mysticism and modern liberal politics, including different formations of modern Jewish politics. While scholars such as Leora Batnitzky, Aamir Mufti, and Sarah Hammerschlag have shown how attention to the “Jewish question” illuminates foundational blind spots, complexities, and dangers of liberalism, this study builds upon that scholarship through demonstrating how representations of Judaism among the architects of modern mysticism reveals a great deal about that very category and its entanglements with liberalism. My study refracts these materials through the prism of three different pathways in modern Jewish politics: assimilation, nationalism, and diaspora.