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Is Judaism essentially a religion of laws and commandments? Or do its sources reflect significant attempts at addressing the individual’s inner life, existential crises and spiritual experiences?
Inner Religion in Jewish Sources offers a comprehensive exploration of inner life in the Jewish sources from the Bible to rabbinic literature, from Medieval Jewish philosophy to Kabbalistic writings and the Hasidic world, where it gained particularly potent expressions. Addressing the issue from the perspective of comparative religion, it seeks to emphasize the commonality of processes of interiorization in various religious traditions, suggesting an innovative angle both in the study of religion and of religious thought. In doing so, it sheds new light on the inner aspect of Jewish religious life, which is all too often hidden behind the external and institutional aspects of the Jewish religion.
Ron Margolin is a professor of Jewish thought and the study of religion at Tel Aviv University and Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is the author of many studies in Hasidism, modern Jewish thought, secular Judaism, and comparative religion. Margolin’s Hebrew book The Human Temple: Religious Interiorization and the Structuring of Inner Life in Early Hasidism will soon be published in English by De Gruyter Press.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part One: Ritual and Custom
Ritual Interiorization and Intent for Commandments
Part Two: Emotion, Sensation, and Experience
Introduction: The Meaning of Ecstatic Experience and Mystical Experience in the Study of Religion
Prophecy, Dreams, and Other Paranormal Experiences
Introspective Contemplation and Inward Focusing
Part Three: Thinking about the Inner
Introduction: Interiorization in Religious Thought
The Conceptual Interiorization of Myth and Law
Existential Aspects of Inner Religious Life
Epistemological Interiorization
Afterword: The Immanent Testimony to the Transcendental
Bibliography
Index