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J. N.
J. N.

168 Followers

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Oct 30, 2022

On Lacunae

(or: Reading Sappho at the Eschaton) — My premise is fourfold: The eschaton — read: the end of history, the days of the Messiah, the world to come — finds its primary symbol and realization in the universal resurrection of the flesh. Universal resurrection will restore individual bodies to their highest state of corporeal perfection. The risen…

9 min read

On Lacunae
On Lacunae

9 min read


Sep 28, 2022

Monarchy and Metaphor

The Holy One, Blessed be He, said: Sing to me on Rosh Hashanah verses of kingship […] that I might be your king. (TB Rosh Hashanah 34b) Leave metaphor, and walk with me. / Do you see traces of the moth in the light? (Darwish) At an especially poignant moment…

7 min read

Monarchy and Metaphor
Monarchy and Metaphor

7 min read


Sep 6, 2022

You Pour Me Like Water

In the haftorah of Rosh Hashanah we read of Chana, an apparently barren woman who would come miraculously to conceive and give birth to Samuel the prophet. The reading concerns Chana’s plea before God in the temple that she might come to be blessed with a child—a prayer so strange…

5 min read

You Pour Me Like Water
You Pour Me Like Water

5 min read


Aug 16, 2022

Kabbalah Studies and the Woman Question

“Woman makes a hole in language … we fail to say her.” (Pierre Naveau) There’s something telling in the discursive centrality of women and the feminine among contemporary academic scholars of Kabbalah. As in other Jewish studies subdisciplines, researchers in Jewish mysticism have been attempting with various degrees of success…

12 min read

Kabbalah Studies and the Woman Question
Kabbalah Studies and the Woman Question

12 min read


Aug 11, 2022

Mourning Diary

There are questions concerning the meaning of the opening of Psalm 126, particularly pertaining to its tense. The verse reads בשוב יהוה את־שיבת ציון היינו כחלמים, which we can render either as “when the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion, we see it as in a dream” (liberally, from JPS)…

6 min read

Mourning Diary
Mourning Diary

6 min read


Jun 27, 2022

Song and Image: Flowers

There’s a difficulty in cataloging discreet instances in the Song of Song where the imagery of flowers in invoked. The Song, crucially, is a song set in spring, and the scent of what we might call a “floral logic” (budding—ripening—blossoming) is favored by the Song in a diffuse manner. The…

Song Of Songs

14 min read

Song and Image: Flowers
Song and Image: Flowers
Song Of Songs

14 min read


May 4, 2022

Song and Image: Veiling

Preface—This is the inaugural installment of an intended series of essays wherein I get to think in depth about certain images and poetic motifs which I consider essential to the symbolic vocabulary of the Song of Songs. …

Song Of Songs

11 min read

Song and Image: Veiling
Song and Image: Veiling
Song Of Songs

11 min read


Apr 24, 2022

Notes on the Missing Daughter

Metaphor and metaphysics in spring — I walk the familiar walk to my rabbi’s home on a certain Sunday and notice for the first time the blooming of wildflowers. I arrive; sweaty, delirious holiday morning prayers. By lunch he tells us about spring: by way of a familiar hermeneutic pun, we should not read the word…

4 min read

Notes on the Missing Daughter
Notes on the Missing Daughter

4 min read


Apr 7, 2022

Eros as a Hermeneutics

Here is love’s tension, love’s politics. Here is form. The reader loves without knowing. (Lisa Robertson, “Time in the Codex”) I. In the early Nabokov story “Signs and Symbols” we learn of an old Russian couple’s trip to see their suicidal son in a sanatorium. It is a rainy day…

7 min read

Eros as a Hermeneutics
Eros as a Hermeneutics

7 min read


Sep 6, 2021

Teshuva: On Memory and Return

When I was born, my parent held me in their arms and remembered me. “I know him,” they said out loud. For a moment they even remembered by name — not the name I have now, neither in Hebrew or English, but a different name connected with their memory of…

6 min read

Teshuva: On Memory and Re/turn
Teshuva: On Memory and Re/turn

6 min read

J. N.

J. N.

168 Followers

Theology, Hermeneutics, Jewish Mysticism | Oberlin 2022

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