The Origins of Jewish Mysticism

This was an excellent book. It has been a long time since I read this work, but I will try to summarize it's main claim. If I remember correctly, Schafer places the origin of Kabbalah in Medieval Europe. According to what he has compiled, the evidence for similar beliefs before this time is scarce at best, and very debatable. However, he does list other scholars who disagree with his conclusions.

We are all familiar with the medieval Kabbala and its modern offshoots. This book deals with precursors to that fascinating development, going all the way back to Hebrew Bible itself. Viewed in the context of world mysticism, the concept of Jewish mysticism (at least in the author's view) turns out to be somewhat problematic, but the individual strands are of great interest, and continue to influence the modern world in various ways. This book is highly recommended.

Good read-Thank you! AAA++++++

excellent

Peter Schäfer’s The Origins of Jewish Mysticism is precisely the kind of magisterial discussion one would hope for from this author. He summarizes in detail every important ascent text (his term for a description of human vision of or ascent to the divine throne) from Ezekiel to the early middle ages (this in itself is a major contribution when the key texts—the Hekhalot texts—have lacked an English translation until 2015 and that exists only in a $200 Brill volume most American research libraries and seminaries have decided not to purchase—it’s author James Davila would have done better to have simply posted his apparently brilliant translation on line since it serves so small an audience; at this point in his career he scarcely needs the Brill imprimatur to validate his credentials), including, from Schäfer’s perspective, the odd man out of Philo. His presentation of the Hekhalot texts is especially useful for the control of the various manuscript sources that Schäfer, as the editor of the texts, brings to his work. Just as importantly, Schäfer’s narrative account of the texts includes discussions of the various problems with the texts and scholarly discussion on them, naturally giving his own very learned opinion.Schäfer’s own scholarly interests and predilections naturally shape his own work. A fundamentalist, however, could read Schäfer’s simple repetition of the identity of Ezekiel and the time and place of his vision lifted from the text and mistake Schäfer’s position for his own. This is because Schäfer has no interest in the communities that shape the texts he studies (he says, for instance not a single word about Philo’s Therapeutae). The authorship of Ezekiel, or its date, except in the most general terms, holds no interest for him. He is interested in texts only as texts, to the extent that he sees the way forward for the study of the Hekhalot texts under the category of the history of the book.Schäfer’s larger thesis is that no actual mystical experience lies behind the visions described in the ascent apocalypse tradition (beginning with the Book of the Watchers) or in the Hekhalot texts. He sees them only as literary developments of Ezekiel. The experience of ecstasy is described clearly in The Ascension of Isaiah and the macrofom Hekhalot Zutarti in scenes in which the teacher, surrounded by his students, lies unresponsive as a man asleep while his consciousness is directed from the world of the senses toward the inner world of his ecstatic experience (aptly described by the Hekhalot authors as a descent—a descent into the unconscious we would say). For Schäfer, the rarity of these passages indicate that they play no important part in Jewish mysticism. He also denies that the two passages can be read in relationship with each other (or with the Gaonic period description of inducing an ecstatic experience by sitting with the head bent down between the legs, which we know was a regular practice of the Kabbalists [Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, p. 74ff, esp. the literatures cited at p. 88, n. 90, cf. I Kings 18:42, which Schäfer excludes from his argument; Schäfer is correct, contra Morton Smith, that Paul’s relation of being caught up to the third heaven refers to his own experience rather than Jesus’]), while he is perfectly happy to see a continuous tradition of unio liturgica (a useful concept Schäfer develops in this book) between the same texts. Another way to look at the passages is to consider they offer a glimpse into the oral tradition and practical instruction accompanying the ascent texts. Schäfer preëmpts this argument by insisting that we have no evidence of such traditions, which is true so long as we exclude these passages.In the conclusion, Schäfer takes his denial of any ecstatic experience in the ascent texts to an extreme. He supposes that the only reason anyone would argue in favor of ecstatic practices in connection with these texts is a hidden agenda to impose a Christian interpretation of them, to read them only in the light of Christian mysticism. If pressed he might walk this back to a Neoplatonic agenda, but that doesn’t make much difference. It is hard to see how such an agenda could be found in authors like Davila or Idel. He flirts with the thesis of Boaz Huss (fully argued only in Hebrew) that imposing a mystical interpretation on the text is a kind Saidian Orientalism, though Schäfer admits the idea is a bit too politically correct for this own conservative nature. Schäfer goes as far as qualifying ecstatic experience as “paranormal” (p. 337). This loaded word suggests that ecstasy is something unreal, akin to pseudo-scientific ideas of psychic powers. I would like to see how he would react if pressed on that point.Schäfer is absolutely correct that his text-historical approach is valuable, necessary, even indispensable, to the study of the ascent texts. But we know that ecstatic experience is a real part of the human experience common to all times and cultures. It is a mistake to dismiss as lightly as Schäfer does the work that Davila did (Descenders to the Chariot) to contextualize the Merkavah experience within cross-cultural accounts of ecstasy. We know from the little clinical work done on the psychological states of ecstasy, from Dostoevsky’s account of his experience of epileptic seizures (please don’t assume I am one of the crazy people who think mysticism is a case of undiagnosed epilepsy—rather it demonstrates the kind of experience that the human mind is capable of having; [...] is a recently reported and interesting account of religious mania occasioned by an epileptic seizure, however), even from Stanley Koren and Michael Persinger’s so-called god helmet (e.g., Persinger et al., "The Electromagnetic Induction of Mystical and Altered States Within the Laboratory," Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research 1.7 [2010]: 808–830. ), that the mind is capable of a state of consciousness in which it fabricates an overwhelming sense of meaning and importance attached to the random experience of memories that cannot later be accurately described or recalled, together with a sense of the presence of another person who is not actually there (often perceived as threatening). This state seems to be well described in the Hekhalot mystic’s descent to the divine throne, his constant fear of being killed by hostile angelic powers unless they are constantly appeased by the right mystical names and seals, his transformation into an angel himself (Schäfer does not accept the universally held interpretation of the transformations of Metatron and other figures in the Hekhalot texts as the representation of the experience of individual mystics under the guise of a culture hero, another literalist reading), and his reception of prophecy vital to the community of Israel (or in later texts simply his own cosmic magical powers). The ascent texts can be convincingly read as an expression of the psychological state of ecstasy within the language of Jewish tradition. The degree and nature of the separation of mystical experience from the text is not one Schäfer is able to discuss since he cannot admit that the texts are mystical to begin with. The tradition of ascent texts is based on older prophetic texts, which bear their own traces of genuine ecstatic experience; although Schäfer excludes from his calculus any text representing traditions older than Ezekiel.Psychological and cross-cultural studies of mysticism must seem terribly foreign to Schäfer’s inestimable text-based scholarship. One could perhaps say that Schäfer’s approach to mysticism grows out of rabbinic ideology. In the wake of the failed Jewish Revolt and the disastrous destruction of the Temple, the rabbis wanted to focus entirely on the text and deny that other forms of spirituality (including messianic expectations) existed, limiting Judaism to the book, the particularly rabbinic sphere of power (a conception of rabbinic Judaism I first learned from Schäfer’s Jesus and the Talmud).

Schäfer has written a book with a balanced view on the history of the Hekhalot writings.Recommended to everyone who wants to study Hekhalot.

Exactly as described. Very satisfied!