Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

ABSTRACT:

Spiritual love of the friend is explored in this essay that analyzes briefly a survey of a few key letters in the correspondence of the Hasidic masters of Tiberias with their disciples from the Diaspora. Reading these Hasidic letters opens the reader to a powerful immersion within a language that folds in and transcends itself through a Hasidic hermeneutic known as imbrication, whereby one verse overlaps and is interwoven with another verse at any point of emphasis based on a shared word or phrase. Such a hermeneutics of imbrication—while not necessarily unique to Hebrew literature in general, and philosophic mysticism in particular—allow these Letters of Love from Tiberias to take on more nuanced applications, insofar as they open heretofore unseen interconnections of one heart-mind to another, in that deep intimacy that comes from a distance.