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Academics debate how to approach kabalah, the heart of Jewish mysticism
FOR a 3 a.m. class, the enrollment is not bad. Each morning, a few dozen students gather in a study hall in the small town of Telz Stone, 15 minutes west of Jerusalem, for Rabbi Avraham Gottlieb's class in the Jewish mystical system known as kabalah.
Rabbi Gottlieb, whose scraggly beard, curled sidelocks, and black robe identify him as a Hasid, generally teaches a text by Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, a prolific Jerusalem kabalist of the first half of the 20th century who was well-versed in both Moses and Marx. The class sessions are devoted to understanding how the author's doctrines of esoteric practices and altruistic community should be applied to daily life.
Rabbi Ashlag, unlike some other mystics, taught his disciples that they must work for a living. And so, after the threehour session, many of the students go off to their jobs. They gather again in the late afternoon for another round of study.
Since October, they have been joined on Tuesday afternoons by scholars of a different sort. On that day, professors and graduate students who study kabalah at Israel's largely secular universities come to Telz Stone for a class with Rabbi Gottlieb. Their search is not for spirituality but for a philological and critical understanding of the texts.
"They're different worlds, but there's something in common," Rabbi Gottlieb says. The scholars, too, "are people who are accustomed to think."
MOVING IN NEW DIRECTIONS
The Tuesday-afternoon classes with a practicing mystic represent a new trend in kabalah studies. Since Gershom Scholem founded the field, at the beginning of the 20th century, its focus has been on the study of the classic texts and schools of Jewish mysticism, from the Second Temple period (around 536 B.c. to A.p. 70) through the Middle Ages. For the most part, the feeling in the scholarly community was that most everything that was of interest in Jewish mysticism had happened before the 18th century.
Lately, though, the field has expanded in several directions. Although much of the work still revolves around the interpretation of medieval manuscripts, some American scholars have unsettled their Israeli colleagues by constructing readings of mystical texts that borrow concepts from postmodern literary...