Hasidic Commentary on the Torah

Hasidic Commentary on the Torah - The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

Paperback (07 Jun 2024)

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Publisher's Synopsis

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2018.

Hasidism, a movement of religious awakening and social reform, originated in the mid-eighteenth century. After two and a half centuries of crisis, upheaval, and renewal, it remains a vibrant way of life and a compelling aspect of Jewish experience. This book explores the profound intellectual and religious issues that the hasidic masters raised in their Torah commentary, and brings to the fore the living qualities of their sermons (derashot).

Ora Wiskind-Elper addresses a spectrum of topics: creation, revelation, and redemption; hermeneutics, epistemology, psychology, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, art history, Hebrew fiction, cultural history, and tropes of Jewish suffering and hope. Fully engaged in the texts and their spirituality, she brings them to bear on postmodernist challenges to traditional spiritual and religious sensibilities.

This is a comprehensive study, unique in pedagogy, clarity, and originality. It uses the full range of critical scholarship on hasidism as a social and ideological movement. At the same time, it maintains a strong focus on hasidic Torah commentary as a conveyor of theology and value. Each of its chapters presents a fundamentally new approach. Wiskind-Elper's translations are in themselves an innovative moment in the tradition and spiritual history of the passages she offers.

Book information

ISBN: 9781837640522
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Imprint: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
Pub date:
DEWEY: 222.106
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 230
Weight: 360g
Height: 155mm
Width: 234mm
Spine width: 16mm