"With Letters of Light": Festschrift for Rachel Elior

In the first post that I put up with notes from SBL, I mentioned that a Festschrift in honor of Rachel Elior was presented to her at a gathering of the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism group. The volume was edited by Daphna Arbel and my former Marquette professor, Andrei Orlov.  You can check it out here:

With Letters of Light: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish Apocalypticism, Magic and Mysticism (Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 2 ; eds. Daphna Arbel and Andrei Orlov, De Gruyter, 2010), forthcoming, $201.00, ISBN 978-3-11-022201-2.

The topics covered in this book are extremely interesting. You can see the Table of Contents here:

http://www.marquette.edu/maqom/EkstasisContents.pdf

Like most academic books these days, the price is quite prohibitive (especially if you’re a poor student), but if you are interested in these topics, this looks like one that you won’t want to pass up!

And if you can’t get your hands on a copy yet, you can enjoy Orlov’s contribution to the volume here:

http://www.marquette.edu/maqom/kavodazazel.html

SBL Notes 2009: Daphna Arbel — Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity

Daphna Arbel (read by Robin Griffith-Jones)

Moshe Idel and Religious Experience in the Hekhalot Literature

Moshe Idel’s research features an open methodology – a pluralistic/interdisciplinary approach

His work is  representative of a new scholarly view of Judaism – based on experiential orientation

The focus of his research principally covers Judaism of the 4^th to 9^th century – the Hekhalot period (a.k.a. merkabah mysticism)

Idel doesn’t subscribe to evolutionary development of religion. His focus is on the interplay of experiential orientations in different schools of Judaism.

Merkabah Mysticism presents a continuous circulation between divine and human – an open circuit between heaven and earth – the possibility, or reality, of  interaction through open channels between the worlds

Unio mystica

The participation of humans in the divine being is the subject of many of Idel’s studies. Gershom Scholem argues that humans are not able to experience union with God in merkabah mysticism. Idel challenges these conclusions – he warns that we should not marginalize unio mystica. There is a certain theological perspective that ignores possibility of union. However, 3 Enoch (a hekhalot text) describes the transformation of Enoch into Metatron – this should be understood as an example of unio mystica – union with Enoch and angel Metatron.