Contents Foreword ix Introduction xiii 1. Left Contained in the Right: A Study in Zoharic Hermeneutics 1 2. Light through Darkness: The Ideal of Human Perfection in the Zohar 29 3. Beautiful Maiden without Eyes: Peshat. and Sod in Zoharic Hermeneutics 56 4. Forms of Visionary Ascent as Ecstatic Experience in the Zoharic Literature 111 5. Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynization 144 6. Re/membering the Covenant:Memory, Forgetfulness, and the Construction of History in the Zohar 185 7. Fore/giveness on the Way:Nesting in the Womb of Response 228 8. Occultation of the Feminine and the Body of Secrecy in Medieval Kabbalah 258 Index 295

Renowned as one of the world’s most astute interpreters of Kabbalistic texts, Elliot Wolfson offers an illuminating and original presentation of Kabbalah. Combining its wisdom with Western philosophical heritage from Plato to Heidegger and beyond, synergy guides his elucidation of the fundamentals of Jewish mysticism and shapes his taxonomy of Kabbalistic thought. A deeply dialectical thinker, Wolfson holds seemingly paradoxical tenets in tandem: Medieval Judaism and American modernity; the ‘tradition’ of Kabbalah and postmodern philosophy; sexual body and human spirit; ontological truth and religious imagination; revelation and occultation; good and evil; left and right – none of these, he writes, are diametrically opposite. Rather, they are dialectical poles with which to think and through which to intuit, tools to gaining a deeper understanding of the Jewish mystical tradition and its meaning for the twenty-first century. An insightful collection of seminal essays written between 1986 and 1998, Luminal Darkness reveals the unmistakably poetic nature of this important scholar’s creative process, and delineates the evolution of his thinking on the role and importance of the Zohar in Kabbalistic tradition. Author Elliot R. Wolfson is the Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew Studies at New York University. He is currently the Editor of the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy and the author of several award-winning books on Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah.

"Wolfson offers an illuminating and original presentation of Kabbalah. Combining its wisdom with Western philosophical heritage from Plato to Heidegger and beyond, synergy guides his elucidation of the fundementals of Jewish mysticism and shapes his taxonomy of Kabbalistic thought."

"Wolfson 'gets it'. He knows. And he can communicate, somehow, this gnosis to his attentive and properly prepared readers." Jeffrey Kripal - J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Reli