RT Article
T1 Hasidic Halakhah: reappraising the interface of spirit and law
JF AJS review
VO 41
IS 2
SP 375
OP 408
A1 Kahana, Maoz
A1 Mayse, Ariel Evan 1986-
LA English
PB University of Pennsylvania Press
YR 2017
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/167748800X
AB This paper offers a novel perspective regarding the interface between law, mysticism, and social reality. The inner turn that characterizes Hasidism is often understood through a binary model defined by the Christian Hebraists, and followed by many academic scholars, in which law and spirit exist in intractable tension. We suggest, however, that in the specific contexts of Hasidism, nomos, eros, and mystical piety often merged in distinctive ways, and that these are visible in novel forms of Jewish legal method and discourse. Our appreciation of the multifaceted Jewish religious and pietistic expressions of modernity should not be made to conform to the generally accepted definition of an era of strict “Orthodox” formulation and monolithic, conservative legal stagnation. Instead, we argue that the spiritual and legal ethos of Hasidism took on new forms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as local identities became increasingly complex and new cultural fusions led to creative re-expressions of law and theology.
DO 10.1017/S0364009417000423