Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
Kabbalah in America; Ancient Lore in the New World
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2020) 316-340
Keywords:
Hutner, Isaac,
;
Rabbis Attitudes
;
Cabala
Abstract:
A vexing issue in kabbalistic lore is the privileging of the Jew as the somatic and pneumatic embodiment of divinity in the world. Examining this anthropological question in the worldview of Isaac Hutner (1906–1980) is especially important given the political context of his teaching in America. Can we find evidence in his discourses for a less ethnocentric attitude that is genuinely hospitable toward the non-Jew in his or her otherness? The apologetic justification that the deleterious attitude of kabbalists was cultivated in environments hostile to Jews whose rhetoric of dissonance can therefore be excused as reactionary self-defense is dispelled by the example of Hutner and his social setting. Translating the older kabbalistic gnosis, Hutner unfailingly taught that the messianic calling of the Jew sponsors the dialetheic truth that Jew and non-Jew are identical in virtue of being nonidentical.
DOI:
10.1163/9789004428140_019
URL:
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