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…

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)…

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…

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. …