Kabbalah: New Perspectives by Moshe Idel
Volume 2 , Issue 5 (June, 1989 | Sivan, 5749) New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Moshe Idel 's Kabbalah: New
Perspectives is a major new academic work on the kabbalah,
which means that it will immediately be held suspect by those who, having read Gershom Scholem's works, are
suspicious of any approach to the Kabbalah which
proceeds from a vantage point outside Orthodox Jewish tradition. Idel, himself, is quite straightforward: academic students
of the Kabbalah (himself presumably included) are in
the main secular Jews who approach their subject
much like a historian or anthropologist approaches a foreign culture.
Nevertheless, Idel's book is surprisingly in harmony
with the traditional view of Jewish mysticism. There are several reasons for
this. The first is that, in contrast to Scholem, Idel takes a phenomenological as opposed to a purely
textual and historiographic approach to the Kabbalah, and his point of view is one which is, therefore,
close to that of the kabbalist's themselves. The
second reason is that, in contrast to his predecessors, Idel
takes the notion of an oral kabbalistic tradition
quite seriously and
holds that there
are indeed important gaps in the written documents. This, in part, enables him to speak of a relatively ?organic
evolution of Jewish mysticism,? in which ideas which appear in written form at a late
date are seen as
evolving out of older ?oral? traditions. Idel
buttresses his view of the ?organicity-
of the Kabbalah by referring to material in various
layers of Jewish literature,some of it apparently
quite remote from mystical concerns. Kabbalah,
according to Idel, is certainly not a Judaification of foreign (Gnostic and Neoplatonic)
ideas, but a genuine Jewish phenomenon. Finally, Idel
acknowledges that ?contact with kabbalists who both
study and conduct their lives in accordance with the requirements of the Kabbalah can enrich the academic vision of what Kabbalah is.? Indeed, he criticizes Israeli academicians
for their failure to dialogue with contemporary kabbalists
who are at their own doorsteps in |