PATHWINGS: Philosophic and Poetic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time and Language by Elliot R. Wolfson

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These essays and poems by a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism explore the connections between sexuality, divinity, and textuality, working with topics such as the gender of the Godhead, Apocalypse in the Kabbalah, the suffering of God, the hermeneutics of visionary experience, and other controversial features of Jewish thought. The poems and essays reverberate with and shed light on one another, creating a resonance that reinforces the depth and originality of Wolfson’s thought. Wolfson has discerned that the poetic mode is more than a stylistic accessory to his Kabbalistic texts, for the poetic way opens modes of logic inaccessible to traditional philosophizing. Rather than maintaining strict dichotomy between philosophy and poetry, Wolfson offers a fruitful convergence. Here, as always, this brilliant thinker and master of paradox steeps his readers? minds in the glistening depths of Jewish mystical waters.-Barbara E. Galli, McGill University