Roads to utopia : the walking stories of the Zohar / David Greenstein.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Greenstein, David, 1951- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Zohar.
• Cabala.
• Mysticism--Judaism.
• Walking in literature.
• Jewish literature--Themes, motives.
• Jewish literature.
• Themes, motives.

Physical Description:

xi, 310 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2014.

Summary:

As the Greatest Book of Jewish Mysticism, the Zohar is a revered and much-studied work. Yet, surprisingly, scholarship on the Zohar has yet to pay attention to its most unique literary device-the presentation of its insights while its teachers walk on the road. In these pages, rabbi and scholar David Greenstein offers the first examination of the "walking on the road" motif. Greenstein's original approach hones in on how this motif expresses the struggles with spatiality and the everyday presented in the Zohar. He argues that the walking theme is not a metaphor for realms to be collapsed into or transcended by the holy, as conventional interpretations would have it. Rather, it conveys us into those quotidian spaces that are obdurately present alongside the realm of the sacred. By embracing the reality of mundane existence, and recognizing the prosaic dimensions of the worldly path, the Zohar is an especially exceptional mystical treatise. In this volume, Greenstein makes visible a singular, though previously unstudied, achievement of the Zohar. Book jacket.

Contents:

• Studying the Zohar : a unique book and a unique motif
• Spatiality and the Zohar : places, spaces, and movement in and through them
• The dregs of tar
• Walking with God
• The spatial orientation of the Zohar
• The body wishes to walk
• The broad dissemination of Torah : "the Torah is not the heritage of only one place"
• Zoharic geographics
• Conclusion : the quotidian utopia of the Zohar.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

• 9780804788335
• 0804788332

OCLC:

862575169