Publication
Imprint: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2003. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. Responsibility: Lawrence Fine. OCLC Number: 51093167. Physical: Text : 1 volume : xiii, 480 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. Features: Includes bibliography, index.
Call number
Commentary / Fine
ISBN
9780804748261
Collections
CSS Library Notes
Named Person: Isaac ben Solomon Luria, 1534-1572
Description: "Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Though he lived only briefly in the Galilean city of Safed, his name became synonymous with the great renaissance of mystical community that took place there in the sixteenth century. Luria's powerful religious imagination and personal charisma aroused the most fervent enthusiasm, and he became the dynamic center of a mystical fellowship of followers. Given his importance, it is remarkable that this is the first scholarly work on him in English." "Most studies of Lurianic Kabbalah focus on Luria's mythic and speculative ideas. The central premise of this book is that Lurianic Kabbalah was first and foremost a lived and living phenomenon, the actual social world of a historically observable community of kabbalists. Thus, it focuses on Luria the person and his relationship to his disciples." "In addition to the social dimensions of the Lurianic community, the author also explores in detail the fascinating and complex ritual culture that Luria fashioned. Luria provided his disciples with individualized penitential instructions to enable them to purify their souls and prepare themselves for various types of contemplative activity. He also assigned meditative intentions to accompany prayer and the performance of religious precepts, and devised special prostrations at the graves of deceased teachers as a means of communing with the departed. Luria believed that the mystical devotions of his small circle of disciples could bring about an end to exiled existence at every level of being and effect the redemption of the whole cosmos." -- Jacket.
Table of Contents: Introduction: embodying the study of Lurianic Kabbalah --
ch. 1. Rabbinical scholar, spice dealer, contemplative ascetic --
ch. 2. Lamenting the exile, striving for redemption --
ch. 3. Saintliness, heavenly communication, and the divinatory arts --
ch. 4. Lurianic myth --
ch. 5. Physician of the soul --
ch. 6. Tiqqun: healing the cosmos through the performance of mitsvot --
ch. 7. Tiqqun: healing the cosmos through contemplative prayer --
ch. 8. Communing with the "very special dead" --
ch. 9. Metempsychosis, mystical fellowship, and Messianic redemption.
FY2019 /
Description: "Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Though he lived only briefly in the Galilean city of Safed, his name became synonymous with the great renaissance of mystical community that took place there in the sixteenth century. Luria's powerful religious imagination and personal charisma aroused the most fervent enthusiasm, and he became the dynamic center of a mystical fellowship of followers. Given his importance, it is remarkable that this is the first scholarly work on him in English." "Most studies of Lurianic Kabbalah focus on Luria's mythic and speculative ideas. The central premise of this book is that Lurianic Kabbalah was first and foremost a lived and living phenomenon, the actual social world of a historically observable community of kabbalists. Thus, it focuses on Luria the person and his relationship to his disciples." "In addition to the social dimensions of the Lurianic community, the author also explores in detail the fascinating and complex ritual culture that Luria fashioned. Luria provided his disciples with individualized penitential instructions to enable them to purify their souls and prepare themselves for various types of contemplative activity. He also assigned meditative intentions to accompany prayer and the performance of religious precepts, and devised special prostrations at the graves of deceased teachers as a means of communing with the departed. Luria believed that the mystical devotions of his small circle of disciples could bring about an end to exiled existence at every level of being and effect the redemption of the whole cosmos." -- Jacket.
Table of Contents: Introduction: embodying the study of Lurianic Kabbalah --
ch. 1. Rabbinical scholar, spice dealer, contemplative ascetic --
ch. 2. Lamenting the exile, striving for redemption --
ch. 3. Saintliness, heavenly communication, and the divinatory arts --
ch. 4. Lurianic myth --
ch. 5. Physician of the soul --
ch. 6. Tiqqun: healing the cosmos through the performance of mitsvot --
ch. 7. Tiqqun: healing the cosmos through contemplative prayer --
ch. 8. Communing with the "very special dead" --
ch. 9. Metempsychosis, mystical fellowship, and Messianic redemption.
FY2019 /
Physical description
xiii, 480 p.; 23 cm
Awards
Koret Jewish Book Awards (2003)
Description
Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Given his importance, it is remarkable that this is the first scholarly work on him in English. Most studies of Lurianic Kabbalah focus on Luria's mythic and speculative ideas or on the ritual and contemplative practices he taught. The central premise of this book is that Lurianic Kabbalah was first and foremost a lived and living phenomenon in an actual social world. Thus the book focuses on Luria the person and on his relationship to his disciples. What attracted Luria's students to him? How did they react to his inspired and charismatic behavior? And what roles did Luria and his students see themselves playing in their collective quest for repair of the cosmos and messianic redemption?… (more)
Language
Original language
English
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User reviews
LibraryThing member antao
It is interesting a singularity in (or coalescent with) space, is employed in humanity's attempts to characterize the fundamental nature of existence. The only thing that changes over the course of recorded history is the vocabulary, which reflects the prevailing zeitgeist.
Just this morning I was
Fine's translation of Luria: "When [Ein-Sof] determined to create its world and to issue forth the world of emanated entities...Ein-Sof...withdrew itself from its centermost point, at the center of its light, and this light retreated from the center to the sides, and thus there remained a free space, an empty vacuum."
Fine goes on to comment, "The perimeter of the empty space left by the act...was circular in shape, and equidistant from the centermost point..."
A simple projection of what is presumed to be the Abrahamic zeitgeist? In Samten Gyaltsen Karmay's book "The Great Perfection", a work examining the subtleties of a school of Tibetan Buddhism referred to as rDzogs chen, Karmay provides a translation of a roughly 1,300 year-old foundational text of the entire system, a text subtitled "the Central point of Space" (IOL 594, for those who wish to examine the text more closely).
The document is an epistemology that asserts mind itself, self-awareness, is the progenitor of the metaphor of the inchoate singularity. Part of Karmay's translation reads as follows:
How much does a deep non-imagination
Appear as an object of the intellect?
The experience of the profound non-imagination
Is of experience, not imagination.
...
However profound the words one utters,
One cannot express the point.
The difference between the presumption of the desert religions regarding the relationship of the primordial singularity to space and that of particular schools of Buddhism (as well as other non-Buddhist groups) is profound. The former group, a faith-based group, asserts the singularity abides in space, while the latter group, a group that proscribes the act of faith, asserts the singularity is coalescent with space.
An invariant singularity, one that abides in space, functions as the foundation of simple arithmetic and logic. As such it forms the basis of whatever fundamental structure is projected upon the primordially inchoate sphere. A faith-based structure, its laws are forever undermined by its inherent lack of verity.
A coalescent singularity is, by its very nature, ineffable; subject to interpretation. There are not an innumerable number of universes in this characterization, only one whose definition is unbounded.
Just this morning I was
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reading Lawrence Fine's book "Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos" (subtitled "Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship") and the very same imagery popped up. This is 16th century (CE) stuff yet it speaks of the singularity from which all was created. Ein-Sof, which is referred to below, may be thought of as an ineffable singularity.Fine's translation of Luria: "When [Ein-Sof] determined to create its world and to issue forth the world of emanated entities...Ein-Sof...withdrew itself from its centermost point, at the center of its light, and this light retreated from the center to the sides, and thus there remained a free space, an empty vacuum."
Fine goes on to comment, "The perimeter of the empty space left by the act...was circular in shape, and equidistant from the centermost point..."
A simple projection of what is presumed to be the Abrahamic zeitgeist? In Samten Gyaltsen Karmay's book "The Great Perfection", a work examining the subtleties of a school of Tibetan Buddhism referred to as rDzogs chen, Karmay provides a translation of a roughly 1,300 year-old foundational text of the entire system, a text subtitled "the Central point of Space" (IOL 594, for those who wish to examine the text more closely).
The document is an epistemology that asserts mind itself, self-awareness, is the progenitor of the metaphor of the inchoate singularity. Part of Karmay's translation reads as follows:
How much does a deep non-imagination
Appear as an object of the intellect?
The experience of the profound non-imagination
Is of experience, not imagination.
...
However profound the words one utters,
One cannot express the point.
The difference between the presumption of the desert religions regarding the relationship of the primordial singularity to space and that of particular schools of Buddhism (as well as other non-Buddhist groups) is profound. The former group, a faith-based group, asserts the singularity abides in space, while the latter group, a group that proscribes the act of faith, asserts the singularity is coalescent with space.
An invariant singularity, one that abides in space, functions as the foundation of simple arithmetic and logic. As such it forms the basis of whatever fundamental structure is projected upon the primordially inchoate sphere. A faith-based structure, its laws are forever undermined by its inherent lack of verity.
A coalescent singularity is, by its very nature, ineffable; subject to interpretation. There are not an innumerable number of universes in this characterization, only one whose definition is unbounded.
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