A perpetually creative platform, kabbalistic literature challenges plain, predictable, or privileged interpretations of biblical narratives, reimagining and reinventing familiar characters, episodes, and images. Eve, Esther, and Judith, for example, embody the female aspect of the kabbalistic divinity, as do several nameless women whose roles the Kabbalah augments and celebrates, often in daring and surprising ways. What allows the Kabbalah to revolutionize hermeneutical practices is its capacity to explore a wide variety of styles and genres: drama, poetry, the fairy tale, the picaresque novel, the personal diary, the dream journal, surrealist fiction, magical realism, philosophical investigations, modernist modes of expression, and other storytelling strategies. This book traces the development of kabbalistic literature, from the late Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, while applying kabbalistic methods and sensibilities to the parables of Jesus, the epistles of Paul, and other related texts. Despite its literary and theological sophistication, the Kabbalah rarely promotes its unique version of the human-divine story as a definitive account or an authorized version. Refraining from favoring one meaning at the expense of others, the Kabbalah offers a truly diverse and highly capacious program that serves as a potential antidote to the current division of human experience into proverbial echo chambers.
Gilad Elbom is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and the University of North Dakota. He is a senior instructor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University, the fiction editor of the North Dakota Quarterly, and author of Textual Rivalries: Jesus, Midrash, and Kabbalah (Fortress, 2022).
The Garments of God: How Multiple Interpretations Cloak the Text The Blueprint of the Universe: How the Text Became Flesh The Transmigration of Souls: How the Flesh Hosts Multiple Spirits The Characters of the Underworld: How Evil Spirits Return to Good The God of the Future: How Humanity Returns to Genesis
This is a splendid and genuinely unprecedented book. How easy it is to overlook what should be one of the most conspicuous aspects of kabbalistic tradition: the sheer richness of its imaginative power, its poetry, its literary grandeur and strangeness. And Elbom is to be thanked for capturing so much of that in so economical a form. --David Bentley Hart, author of You Are Gods Gilad Elbom's Kabbalah as Literature provides a refreshing contemporary approach to kabbalistic texts. The author maintains fidelity to these texts' basic narratives, while at the same time holding that only the individual reader's radical openness to infinite layers of meaning can adequately reflect the Kabbalist's infinite conception of the divine. --Sanford L. Drob, author of Kabbalah and Postmodernism Bursting with creativity, the Kabbalah and this rich discussion of it will endlessly surprise readers. --Regina Schwartz, author of Toward a Sacramental Poetics
