Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism

by Shaul Magid

Overview

Piety and Rebellion examines the span of the Hasidic textual tradition from its earliest phases to the 20th century. The essays collected in this volume focus on the tension between Hasidic fidelity to tradition and its rebellious attempt to push the devotional life beyond the borders of conventional religious practice. Many of the essays exhibit a comparative perspective deployed to better articulate the innovative spirit, and traditional challenges, Hasidism presents to the traditional Jewish world. Piety and Rebellion is an attempt to present Hasidism as one case whereby maximalist religion can yield a rebellious challenge to conventional conceptions of religious thought and practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781618117519
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	03/08/2019
Series:	New Perspectives in Post-Rabbinic Judaism
Pages:	580
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Shaul Magid is the Jay and Jeanie Schottensten Professor in the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana Universityand Kogod Senior Research Fellow at The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He is a member of the American Academy of Jewish Research. His work spans the areas of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and Modern Jewish Thought and Culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction—My Way to (Neo) Ḥasidism

Early Ḥasidism

Chapter 1 “What happened, happened”: R. Ya’akov Yosef of Polonnoye on Ḥasidic Interpretation

Chapter 2 The Case of Jewish Arianism: The Pre-existence of the Ẓaddik in Early Ḥasidism

Chapter 3 The Intolerance of Tolerance: Maḥaloket (Controversy) and Redemption in Early Ḥasidism

Chapter 4 The Ritual Is Not the Hunt: The Seven Wedding Blessings, Redemption, and Jewish Ritual as Fantasy in R. Shneur Zalman of Liady

Chapter 5 Nature, Exile, and Disability in R. Nahman of Bratslav’s “The Tale of the Seven Beggars”

Later Ḥasidism

Chapter 6 Modernity as Heresy: The Introvertive Piety of Faith in R. Areleh Roth’s Shomer Emunim

Chapter 7 The Holocaust as Inverted Miracle: R. Shalom Noah Barzofsky of Slonim on the Divine Nature of Radical Evil

Chapter 8 The Divine/Human Messiah and Religious Deviance: Rethinking Ḥabad Messianism

Chapter 9 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s Eish Kodesh

Chapter 10 American Jewish Fundamentalism: Ḥabad, Satmar, ArtScroll

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Some scholars move on from the textual studies that distinguished their early work and flower as public intellectuals and communal sages, equipped to survey and interpret the dilemmas of the present. This collection of essays serves as the scholarly and intellectual diary of the evolution of Shaul Magid, tempered in the study of Kabbalah and Hasidism, now a scholarly and communal leader. Anyone who wants to understand the troubled and ambivalent times in which we live would do well to review these studies, which combine scholarly rigor and the eros of spiritual quest.”

—Pinchas Giller, Chair of the Jewish Studies Department and Jean and Harvey z"l Powell, Professor in Medieval Thought, American Jewish University, Los Angeles

“Piety and Rebellion is a superb collection of ten essays on Hasidism by Shaul Magid, one of the more daring and innovative interpreters of Jewish thought and cultural studies. The two parts of the book, early and later Hasidism, demonstrate the impressive range of the author’s command of primary and secondary material. Magid’s studies enrich our understanding of both the historical and the phenomenological contours of the pietism that emerged in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its repercussions in forms of American Jewish fundamentalism that evolved in the twentieth century. Each of the essays is well documented, providing a myriad of avenues of research for future generations. In addition to the ten chapters, the author has provided a moving introduction in which he charts his way to neo-Hasidism, framed particularly in terms of the struggle with the matter of alterity, determining one’s sense of identity in relation to the other and envisioning the possibility of living otherwise. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the struggle with alterity informs many of the essays included in this volume. The charting of Magid’s personal odyssey will surely be of great interest to potential readers and only adds luster to a very fine anthology of critical essays that shed light on the pious nature of rebellion and the rebellious nature of piety.”

—Elliot R. Wolfson, Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Piety and Rebellion further establishes Shaul Magid’s deserved reputation as one of the leading scholars working today on Hasidism and modern Judaism more broadly. The learned and creative essays collected here reflect the prolific span of Magid’s career and constitute a distinguished contribution to the critical interpretation of hasidic texts and ideas. New to this volume, Magid opens with a vivid autobiographical account of his own spiritual and scholarly journey into Hasidism and Neo-hasidism, told with verve as a voyage of intellectual excitement and discovery.”

— Eitan P. Fishbane, Associate Professor of Jewish Thought at The Jewish Theological Seminary and author of The Art of Mystical Narrative: A Poetics of the Zohar (Oxford, 2018)

Editorial Reviews

In pieces that span two decades of research, Magid’s refined thinking interrogates Hasidism(s), as it appeared in moments ranging from the early generation of pioneering piety surrounding the Ba’al Shem Tov to contemporary anti-Zionist Satmar. He navigates the Hasidic underground and yeshivah life as a participant observer while offering critical analyses that move toward a more global religious criticism asking bigger questions from Jewish sources. … Here are essays from a scholar who fuses the rebellious piety of Oleksa Dovbush, Ukrainian Robin Hood and driver of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s horse and buggy, with the pious rebellion of Ken Kesey, the all-American author who drove his Merry Pranksters on their Furthur bus across America through and beyond the psychedelic—a true rough guide for the future study of religion still busy being born.”

— Aubrey L. Glazer, Shaare Zion Congregation, Religious Studies Review (September 2020: Vol. 46, no. 3)

“One distinguishing element of the essays contained in this volume, and of Magid’s work more generally, is a willingness to engage in interpretive play at the intersections where Kabbalah and Hasidism converge. In addition to its eclectic quality, another feature that distinguishes Piety and Rebellion is the book’s bold autobiographical introduction. Here, Magid recounts his own captivating journey. It is the story of a restless intellectual, who, fashioning himself both an insider and an outsider, has sustained his soul on everything from macrobiotics and LSD to the yeshivas of Jerusalem, from the rabbinate to the Ivy League. … I find Piety and Rebellion to be a stimulating addition to the scholarship on Hasidism by one of its most energetic, creative, and politically engaged interpreters. There is much to praise in these studies, which are as varied as the variegated corpus of Hasidism itself.”

— Jeremy Phillip Brown, McGill University, H-Judaic

From the Publisher