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Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. By ELLIOT R. WOLFSON. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. x + 437 pp. $49.50.
The phenomenon of mystical experience in the Jewish tradition is fraught with theological contradictions. How can God, who is never imaged and, in the whole tradition of revelation, only "seen" by Moses from the back (Exodus 33:1923) be encountered in a "vision"? One answer has been to understand Jewish mysticism as a tradition of"auditions" rather than visions, as a purely nonrepresentational form of revelation. Elliot Wolfson's bold and erudite book takes issue with this, arguing that there is a visual aspect, in essence, a mirroring of the human and the divine, at the very heart of the Jewish mystical experience.
The phenomenological approach taken in this book is important to the thesis. Wolfson is careful not to reduce Jewish mysticism to the visual phenomena he describes. Instead, he says, each generation of mystics experiences the divine in a "contextualized" manner, as "links in a continuous chain of tradition" (p. 53). For Wolfson, Jewish mysticism is inherently...