BJH1960 said
Has anyone read anything by Elliot Wolfson? If so, is there something you’d recommend?
  

Yes, ** you do not have permission to see this link **.

When I first got into the subject of Merkabah mysticism I noticed that this book was listed in almost every bibliography I read.  That’s always a good sign that it’s one you’ll want to get.  What particularly resonated for me in this one is that it focuses on the importance of imagination.  I approached the subject through the writings of English visionary poet William Blake for whom imagination was a way of interpreting reality.  (Blake famously wrote that “All gods exist within the human breast.”  But for him this didn’t mean they didn’t exist!  For Blake imagination is not imaginary if you’ll pardon the intentional paradox.) 

Anyway I was drawn by the subject and interested in the view from the Jewish visionary tradition.  In this book Wolfson deals with the precursors of Kabbalah (about which is an acknowledged expert) including Merkabah.  Frankly, when I first got the book I wasn’t ready for this level of erudition.  This is one I definitely need to revisit now that I’m a bit further down the path.  One of Wolfson’s strengths is that he is fluent in contemporary lit/crit approaches and can use them as lenses to interpret the texts. So he doesn’t treat these systems as historical curiosities.    

I notice that Amazon is asking absurd prices for this one.  I paid considerable less than that.  

Bruce, just to be nosey, in what context did you become aware of Wolfson?   

I was interested in Jewish panentheism and authors who wrote about it as scholars and not as advocates.

I’m a huge fan of Hebrew scholar James Kugel, and the book that did it was ** you do not have permission to see this link **.  It’s a collection of essays about the different conceptions of god found in the Hebrew Bible.  (The chapter about the figure of the Angel of the Lord alone is worth the price of admission.)

Relevant to the subject of panentheism is Kugel’s description of ancient Hebrew spiritual sensibility.  He describes their concept of god as a “Field of Divine Presence”, not a distant, utterly transcendent ruler sitting in a remote heaven but a divine reality that is immediate, palpable, and woven into the very fabric of the world. 

To these ancients the boundary between mind and the world was porous and fluid.  Thoughts, dreams, and emotions were not viewed as internal psychological states but were experienced as intrusions from the “Great Outside”.  There was no dualism here between “nature” and “supernature”. The spiritual realm was as palpable as the mundane world.

This explains why the divine could condense into the physical.  God walks through the garden.   One could encounter a traveler on the road or share a meal, and only later realize you were interacting directly with god.

In his book ** you do not have permission to see this link **, Kugel examines how and why he thinks this viewpoint changed.  God became a distant, abstract, transcendent being who is encountered inwardly through prayer or conscience rather than as a stranger on a dusty road. 

The pomegranate has such rich mythological symbolism, being the fruit whose seeds Persephone ate that bound her to the underworld.  Of course it’s one of the multiple candidates for the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

I found this interesting ** you do not have permission to see this link **.  Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate is very beautiful. 

In my younger world traveler days I once had the opportunity to walk through an open air market in Cairo.  Nothing so grand as Istanbul but I nevertheless experienced total sensory overload.  The sights, the sounds, the smells!  And the voices.   I can imagine what it must have been like in ancient times.