Emotions and emotional life have come to assume an important place in the study of religion and the humanities, but little attention has yet been given to considering the kabbalistic and hasidic traditions. This volume aims to fill that gap. Ranging historically from the thirteenth century to contemporary times, it touches on a broad selection of Jewish mystical movements. The theoretical and methodological approaches adopted are similarly diverse, drawn from fields including history, psychology and psychoanalysis, literary and cultural studies, and the history of religion. The range of emotions covered includes shame, guilt, sadness, anger, awe and fear, joy, compassion, and love. How have different teachers and communities conceived of and articulated emotional life? To what extent do emotions play a role in attaining spiritual and moral perfection, and what practices have been encouraged in the pursuit of these ideals? What is the relationship between notions of ethics, interpersonal relations, and emotions? When we speak of emotional life we think not only of ideas about emotions, but also the complex, dynamic role that emotional experience plays in the actual lives of individuals and communities. A substantial introduction to the volume addresses these broad questions in the context of religious literature and culture.
Introduction
Lawrence Fine, Joel Hecker, and Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel
I. Zohar: Transforming and Reframing Negative Emotions
1. Shame in the Panoptic Culture of the Zohar
Joel Hecker
2. Jealousy Revealed as Love: Ars Poetica, Sisterhood, and Repair
Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel
3. There Is AngerandThere Is Anger: Furious Constructions of Zoharic
Subjectivity
Nathaniel Berman
II. Love and Fear: The Unification of Opposite Emotions
4. Fear and Love as Wings of a Bird: Opposing Emotions in Zoharic
Literature
Biti Roi
5. His Limbs Flutter and Tremble Always in Fear of God: Fear in Elimelekh
of Lyzhansks Noam Elimelekh
Leore Sachs-Shmueli
6. Emotion, Ethics, and Mystical Piety: On Fear and Love in Elijah de Vidas
and Isaiah Horowitz
Eitan P. Fishbane
III. Virtue Ethics and Emotions
7. Humility and Hubris, Love and Anger, in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah
Lawrence Fine
8. Grief, Contrition, and Remorse in the Devotional Life and Mystical Poetry
of Jewish Confraternities in Early Modern Italy
Michela Andreatta
IV. Emotional Performances and Practice
9. Beloved Sultan Mehmet Tsevi: Ottoman Love and the Sabbatian Practice of
Mevlid in the Nineteenth Century
Hadar Feldman Samet
10. To Jump for Joy: The Rites of Dance According to R. Nahman of Bratslav
Michael Fishbane
V. Modernity and Emotions
11. Shame as an Existential Emotion in Modern Kabbalah
Jonathan Garb
12. God Wants the Heart: Alienation and Anxiety as a Path to Love and
Social Change in the Kabbalistic Teachings of Yehuda Ashlag
Clémence Boulouque
Lawrence Fine is Irene Kaplan Leiwant Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion, Emeritus, Mount Holyoke College. His books include Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (2004), finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award, and Friendship in Jewish History, Culture, and Religion (2021). Joel Hecker is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Mysticism at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He is the author of Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah (2005) and editor of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, volumes 11 and 12 (201617). Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel is a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa. Her books include The Feminine Messiah: King David in the Image of the Shekhinah in Kabbalistic Literature (2021) and Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (2022), winner of the Gorgias Prize.
