Hasidic Commentary on the Torah (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization) - Softcover

Wiskind–Elper, Ora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1837640521 ISBN 13: 9781837640522

Publisher: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2024

Synopsis

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2018.

Hasidism, a movement of religious awakening and social reform, originated in the mid-eighteenth century. After two and a half centuries of crisis, upheaval, and renewal, it remains a vibrant way of life and a compelling aspect of Jewish experience. This book explores the profound intellectual and religious issues that the hasidic masters raised in their Torah commentary, and brings to the fore the living qualities of their sermons (derashot).

Ora Wiskind-Elper addresses a spectrum of topics: creation, revelation, and redemption; hermeneutics, epistemology, psychology, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, art history, Hebrew fiction, cultural history, and tropes of Jewish suffering and hope. Fully engaged in the texts and their spirituality, she brings them to bear on postmodernist challenges to traditional spiritual and religious sensibilities.

This is a comprehensive study, unique in pedagogy, clarity, and originality. It uses the full range of critical scholarship on hasidism as a social and ideological movement. At the same time, it maintains a strong focus on hasidic Torah commentary as a conveyor of theology and value. Each of its chapters presents a fundamentally new approach. Wiskind-Elper’s translations are in themselves an innovative moment in the tradition and spiritual history of the passages she offers.

About this title

About the Author

Ora Wiskind-Elper is the author of Wisdom of the Heart: The Teachings of Rabbi Ya’akov of Izbica-Radzyn (2010) and Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav (1998). She is associate professor in the Graduate Programme in Jewish Thought at Michlalah Jerusalem College and at Ono Academic College, Israel.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1837640521
• ISBN 13: 9781837640522
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230