Description
Book SynopsisThe present volume honours Rabbi Professor Nehemia Polen, one of those rare scholars whose religious teachings, spiritual writings, and academic scholarship have come together into a sustained project of interpretive imagination and engagement. Without compromising his intellectual integrity, his work brings forth the sacred from the mundane and expands the reach of Torah. He has shown us a path in which narrow scholarship is directly linked to a quest for ever-broadening depth and connectivity. The essays in this collection, from his students, colleagues, and friends, are a testament to his enduring impact on the scholarly community. The contributions explore a range of historical periods and themes, centering upon the fields dear to Polen’s heart, but a common thread unites them. Each essay is grounded in deeply engaged textual scholarship casting a glance upon the sources that is at once critical and beneficent. As a whole, they seek to give readers a richer sense of the fabric of Jewish interpretation and theology, from the history of Jewish mysticism, the promise and perils of exegesis, and the contemporary relevance of premodern and early modern texts.
Table of Contents
- Reading in Harmony: An Introduction
- Judaism as a Path of Love, Avraham Yizhak (Arthur) Green
- To Be or Not to Be: A Tale of Five Sisters, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
- From the Cleft of the Rock: The Eclipse of God in the Bible, Midrash, and Post-Holocaust Theology, Rachel Adelman
- The Unexpected Impact of Sections and Subsections in a Translation of Vayyiqra Rabba: A Case Study, Chaim Milikowsky
- From Leviticus to Latkes: The Origins of Hanukkah’s Miraculous Oil and the Meaning of the Festival, Michael Rosenberg
- Between Tradition and Innovation: The Pedagogical Possibilities of the Penai Yehoshua, Jane Kanarek
- Rediscovering the Covenant: The Contemporary Hasidic Thought of Rabbi Shmuel Berezovsky of Slonim, Alon Goshen-Gottstein
- Protest or Discernment? Divine Limitation and Mystical Activism in the Qedushat Levi, Or N. Rose
- Leadership as Individual Relationships: A Close Study of the No‘am Elimelekh, Ebn Leader
- Letter to Riga: Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn’s Meditative System for a Young Woman, Naftali Loewenthal
- Hasidic Women: Beyond Egalitarianist Discourse, Tsippi Kauffman
- Prophecy and Imagination in the Teachings of R. Tzadoq ha-Kohen of Lublin, R. Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook, and R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Daniel Reiser
- Poetics of Exegesis in the Sefat Emet’s Homilies: Semantic Innovations for Discernment and Disclosure, Elie Holzer
- Transcendent God, Immanent Kabbalah: Prolegomena to the Hasidic Teachings of R. Avraham ha-Malakh, Avinoam J. Stillman
- Losing the Princess: Returning to Self: An Archetypal-Ritual Theory for Spiritual Journeying, Aubrey Glazer
- Caring for the Graves of the Righteous: The Holocaust in Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin’s Sippurei Ḥasidim, Avraham Rosen
- “Like a Moth to the Flame”: The Death of Nadav and Avihu in Hasidic Literature, Ariel Evan Mayse
