Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1. Dimensions of Collective Self-Understanding
Beginnings
Receiving, Revealing
‘When Your Wellsprings Will Flow Forth’
To Create New Worlds with Words
‘They Made Their Souls Anew’
To See and to be Seen
‘Well said, Moses!’

2. Modes of Reading
Metaphors We Live By
A Parable in Wait
Imagining the World
The Essence of Being Human
Bread-Eaters and Dreamers
Know Me in Translation
Conclusions So Far
How to Teach, How to Learn
To Know or Not to Know
Finding the Words
The Secret of Exile
The Secret of Redemption
Summing Up

3. Responses to a Shifting Landscape
Introduction
The Space in the Middle
‘For the Times They are A-Changin’ ’
Reason for Hope
The Inward Turn
Modernity and Its Discontents
‘God is in the Detail’
Prophets of the Past, Prophets of the Future
Deep Blue Sky and Yellow Stars
Song of Dust and Ashes

Postscript
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Ora Wiskind-Elper is the author of Wisdom of the Heart: The Teachings of Rabbi Ya’akov of Izbica-Radzyn (2010) and Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav (1998). She is associate professor in the Graduate Programme in Jewish Thought at Michlalah Jerusalem College and at Ono Academic College, Israel.

Reviews

Reviews 'Hasidism, for Ora Wiskind-Elper, is the crucible into which the whole world flows: creation, revelation, redemption; hermeneutics, epistemology, Freudian psychology, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, autobiography (which she calls “self-perception”), art history, Hebrew fiction, social history, the challenge of modernity, and the major catastrophes that befell the Jewish people in the twentieth century. In order to produce this definitive, synoptic work on Hasidic Torah commentary, she has mastered the entire corpus of critical scholarship; the different schools of Hasidic thought from master to disciple; the relevant methodologies of reading and interpretation; and last but not least, a social-historical guide to the early and later masters and their disciples, down to the present day. Hasidic Commentary on the Torah is magisterial; unique in its scope, pedagogy, clarity and original insight.'
David G. Roskies Sol & Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture Jewish Theological Seminary, New York

‘Ora Wiskind-Elper’s ability to utilize the fullest range of academic scholarship on Hasidism as a cultural and religious movement, in all its diversity is exemplary, and always done with the stronger focus on the role and dynamics of the Hasidic derashah. . . . [her] choice of thematics – from the self-conception of the masters, to their hermeneutics and use of language and tradition, and including the role of historical or social factors to condition the thematics, is not only superb, but brings to the forefront the living qualities of these spiritual sermons, and demonstrates the powerful hermeneutics at play . . . we get an excellent survey of issues . . . one is brought to a new level of comprehension and also spiritual-hermeneutical insight.'
Michael Fishbane, Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Chicago