Kabbalah and the rupture of modernity : an existential history of Chabad Hasidism /

"Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity provides a comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism through the Kabbalistic concept of ṣimṣum. The onset of modernity, Eli Rubin argues, was heralded by this startling idea: existence itself is predicated on a self-inflicted...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Rubin, Eli, 1988- (Author)
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2025]
Series:Stanford studies in Jewish mysticism.
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • Preamble. Conflagration and cosmic rupture
  • Introduction. What does ṣimṣum mean?
  • The Ari as a herald of modernity
  • Love and rupture in early Hasidism
  • "Due to this, the known book was burned"
  • Ṣimṣum, soul-knowledge, and the function of parable
  • Epilogue. Ṣimṣum and the institutionalization of Chabad
  • Introduction : does the world exist?
  • Cosmic construction as cosmic effacement
  • The Chabad sermon : articulating singularity
  • Being, nothing, and Chabad's first succession controversy
  • Rereading Rashaz, rereading reality
  • Epilogue. Opening and closing the door on acosmism
  • Introduction. A tale of two brothers
  • Dynastic rupture and cosmological recalibration
  • The hemshekh : a new literary collage
  • The finite trace of unruptured infinity
  • Chabad's internal ṣimṣum split
  • Epilogue. History and the metaphysics of materialism
  • Introduction. The ruin and renaissance of Lubavitch
  • Rediscovering malkhut, the cosmic womb
  • Why? : innovation and the purpose of ṣimṣum
  • Desire, pleasure, and the transcendence of sense
  • Three paths to essential originality
  • Epilogue. Rashab, Freud, and the meanings of modernity
  • Introduction. Undergoing and overcoming dislocation and catastrophe
  • Letter writing and the Soviet ṣimṣum
  • Bati legani and the triumph of humanity
  • Wissenschaft, ṣimṣum and midcentury succession
  • Messianic faith in the shadow of the Holocaust
  • "Many-worlds" and "uncertainty" in ṣimṣum and science
  • Epilogue. Living for the sake of ṣimṣum
  • Postscript. The art of being.