Mysticism and Social Justice (2025). (2025)

Theism in the Language of Humanism: Reincarnations of the Transcendent God in the Secular Subject

Religions (MDPI) , 2024

The process of secularization can be defined as a shift in the focus of European thought from the transcendent God, the otherworldly, and the suprahuman, towards immanence, that is, towards the world and the human condition in the world. Secularization represents a transition from theism to humanism. Given this definition, it is often concluded that secularization has led to the exclusion of God from thought and the removal of religion from society. Nevertheless, post-secular thought offers a more nuanced and sophisticated perspective. As postulated by numerous theorists, secularization was not a departure from theism and religion in general, but rather a departure from a specific conception of God and a particular mode of religiosity that had been dominant for an extended period. Most contributions to this volume identify the moments of secularization and humanism, not as the elimination of God but on the contrary as an opportunity that various thinkers recognized to liberate the divine from the constraints of hegemonic European theology and religiosity. This perspective suggests that secularization did not erase God but rather created an opportunity for the humanization of religion through ethical, social, or political activation. The papers in this volume take different approaches and offer different responses to the question of how the divine and the transcendent reappear in the discourse of humanism.

"Neo-Hasidism," in _Oxford Bibliographies_ (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Oxford Bibliographies, 2022

A bibliographic resource to support scholars, students, and seekers in their studies of neo-Hasidism. From the introduction: “Neo-Hasidim” (sing. Neo-Hasid) are non-Hasidic Jews who draw upon Hasidism for purposes of spiritual or cultural renewal. Neo-Hasidism is thus rooted in a belief that the core of Hasidism—often identified with the movement’s earliest generations—is transferrable to other sociological contexts. Neo-Hasidim tend to be more secular and liberal-minded than Hasidim, but this is not necessarily the case. Note that even the most radical innovators within Hasidism itself, such as Nahman of Bratslav, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno, or Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, are not “neo-Hasidic” per se, since they operated within Hasidic communities. A border case, however, is women from Hasidic families who have been excluded from the central sites of Hasidic identity performance due to their gender and yet drawn deeply upon Hasidism in their own lives. When neo-Hasidism emerged in Central Europe at the dawn of the 20th century, it represented a striking cultural shift. From the Enlightenment through the 19th century, liberal Jews had generally cast Hasidism as backward, superstitious, and irrational. This was largely a strategic position: by differentiating themselves from “uncivilized,” “oriental” Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews), especially those ecstatic Hasidim, liberal Jews could demonstrate their own worthiness of citizenship and civil rights in modern nation-states. Around the turn of the century, though, a new generation of Jews rejected these bourgeois, assimilationist aspirations. On one hand, unmitigated discrimination against Jews and a rise of racial anti-Semitism seemed to suggest that liberal Jewish denigration of Ostjuden was unproductive, if not immoral. On the other hand, at the same time, a wave of neo-Romanticism swelled in the region, as more and more Europeans asserted that modernist rationalism, promises of progress, and industrialization and urbanization had only bred disenchantment and alienation. Many turned to folk cultures, mythologies, and mysticisms as keys to a renewed vitality. From this perspective, Hasidism took on a new aura. The first wave of what came to be called neo-Hasidism began as a literary phenomenon. Modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers such as Y. L. Peretz (b. 1852–d. 1915), Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (b. 1865– d. 1921), and Samuel Abba Horodezky (b. 1871– d. 1957) wrote glowingly about Hasidism from decidedly non-Hasidic—or, in some cases, ex-Hasidic—vantage points. Around the same time, Hillel Zeitlin (b. 1871– d. 1942) and Martin Buber (b. 1878– d. 1965) celebrated Hasidism as a resource for Jewish religious renewal. Decades later, a second wave of neo-Hasidism took shape among spiritual seekers in the North American Jewish counterculture of the 1960s. Sparked initially by immigrants who had fled the Shoah (Holocaust)—most notably Abraham Joshua Heschel (b. 1907– d. 1972), Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (b. 1924– d. 2014), and Shlomo Carlebach (b. 1925– d. 1994)—the neo-Hasidic ethos gained steam through activities of US-born seekers and scholars, especially through the Jewish Renewal movement. Additional, and sometimes surprising, offshoots of neo-Hasidism continue to spread through today.

Shaul Magid, “The New Jewish Reclamation of Jesus in Late Twentieth-Century America: Re-Aligning and Re-Thinking Jesus the Jew,” in Zev Garber, ed., The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011), 358-382

Shaul Magid, “Abraham Joshua Heschel and Thomas Merton: Heretics of Modernity” Conservative Judaism 50:2-3 (Fall 1998): 112-125

“‘We Shall Do and We Shall Understand’: Embodied Theology in Modern Judaism,” in _The Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body_, ed. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg and George Pati (New York: Routledge, 2023), 86–103.

Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, 2023

A remarkable number of Jewish commentators today highlight the biblical phrase na'aseh ve-nishma, literally "we shall do and we shall hear" (Exod. 24:7), to affirm that theological truth is only intelligible through the prism of bodily events: in "doing," we "hear" or understand divinity. These often cite the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 88a) as a prooftext. However, my paper demonstrates that this interpretation is in fact distinctively modern, reflecting intellectual and political shifts in Europe, especially "enlightened" critiques of metaphysics and heteronomy. This modernness does not imply that the interpretation is therefore some invasive species, corrupting a pristine landscape of indigenous Judaism. On the contrary, Jewish theology unfolds diasporically and hermeneutically—and here is the very heartbeat of a living tradition. The new gloss emerges in late-eighteenth-century Hasidic mysticism and flows thereafter into other tributaries of Jewish thought, from Buber, Heschel, and Levinas through Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Jay Michaelson, and Mara Benjamin. In tracing the hermeneutical afterlives of Exod 24:7, we unveil not only a striking mutation in modern Jewish exegesis but also a broader "embodied theological" turn in modern religiosity. This paper illuminates the intertextual and phenomenological textures of this transformation.

EATWOT – Along the Many Paths of God - V, Toward a Planetary Theology.

EATWOT's «Along the Many Paths of God» Series fifth volume. AUTHORS: VIGIL (ed.), AMALADOSS, BARROS, BRIGENTI, CHIA, EGEA, KNITTER, LOY, MAGESA, NEUSNER, OMAR, OKURE, (†)PANIKKAR, PHAN, PIERIS, RENSHAW, ROBLES, SESHAGIRI, (†)SOARES, TEIXEIRA., 2010

We have asked theologians—men and women—and their response allows us to present an attractive panorama: the theology of the future seems to be heading toward a pluralist model (without the classical complex of religious superiority and without the exclusivity of truth that traditionally accompanied theology). It is moving toward a pluriconfessional theology that we could also call interreligious or multi-religious, or (always paying attention to the nuances of the word) transreligious. There are those who also speak of a post-religional theology (religious but beyond the religions, on a level that is deeper), secular in that sense, and with a planetary awareness in this new knowledge society that in some way is being brought about little by little all across the planet, even in those places where they think it isn’t evident. These theologians offer us some passionate pages, worthy of study and meditation, with positive and negative arguments—for discernment. We hope that the conclusion of the reader will be, as was ours, that these are good times for theology, times of effervescence, of mutation, of new proposals, of risky experiences, of an open future. We are walking at a good pace, not without difficulties, toward a theology that is open and free. Walk with us and see all that in reading these pages. The Co-Authors.

Arthur Green, “Three Warsaw Mystics,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, no. 13 (1996): 1-58

The Holy Versus the Sacred: Offering a Little Trouble for a Multiple Religious Belonging

The purpose of this essay is to illustrate a difficulty which may arise in the attempt to simultaneously identify with more than one religious tradition. Drawing upon the philosophical insights of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I demonstrate how some of the most cardinal themes in one faith or theological perspective may set itself against the central notions of another. Along the way, Kierkegaard, the perennial philosophy, process theology, and even Frank Herbert's science fiction classic Dune are woven into the discussion.

Jewish Meditation or Mysticism Annotated Bibliography 1 2/11/23

Using a discussion of the etymology of re-lig-io as a starting point, this essay begins by considering the problem of religion-of understanding God, and of language as an instrument for achieving the ends of religion and that understanding-and the problem for religion of revelation and interpretation. It follows to the consequences of this double complication for understanding "war" in the biblical and early Christian traditions. The essay leads, then, to a tri-valent discussion of "jihad", and from this jihad centerpiece toward further versions of these complications as they apply to mysticism, medieval Jewish thought and thence toward and into modernity, from Spinoza to Levinas.

Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Jewish Co-Existentialism. Being with the Other,” in Robert Bernasconi and Johnathan Judaken, eds., Situating Existentialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 311-333