In my senior year at Oberlin I was asked to prepare a twenty-verse section from the Hebrew Bible as the final assignment for a translation seminar. By then I was already immersed in my thesis work on a medieval commentary on the Song of Songs, and the choice of a…

In his essay “Pascoli and the Thought of the Voice” Giorgio Agamben treats a linguistic impulse in the poetry of Giovanni Pascoli toward what I will call archaism. …

Royalty on earth is like royalty in heaven. (Berakhot 58a) 1. Arcana imperii Twice in the Annals Tacitus uses a phrase at once opaque and seductive: arcana imperii. Variously translated as “state secrets,” “secrets of imperial policy,” etc. the notion has “enjoyed a rich history in political thought down to the present day.”¹…

An unseasonable confession: I hate drunkenness. I hate being drunk and drunk people in turn repel me. Drinking isn’t something I…

Denk dran, Johanna: der liebe Gott sieht alles. Religious films, like religious people, are generally only interesting to the extent that they’re also kind of opaque. Tarkovsky, a devout point of reference, was known to qualify questions about his religiosity with a rejoinder of opacity: “[my faith] is not so…

(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…

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…

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…

“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…