Touching God: Vertigo, Exactitude, and Degrees of Devekut in the Contemporary Nondual Jewish Mysticism of R

Home , Devekut, Gershom Scholem, Moshe Idel

TOUCHING GOD: VERTIGO, EXACTITUDE, AND DEGREES OF DEVEKUT IN THE CONTEMPORARY NONDUAL JEWISH MYSTICISM OF R. YITZHAQ MAIER MORGENSTERN

Aubrey L. Glazer Jewish Community Center of Harrison, New York [email protected]

Abstract

Whether extrovertive, introvertive, or some further hybrid, the process of the soul touching the fullness of its divine origins is itself undergoing transformation in the twenty-ﬁrst-century cultural matrices of Israel. A remarkable exemplar of devotional Hebrew cultures can be found within the hybrid networks of haredi worlds in Israel today. R. Yitzhaq Maier Morgenstern, author of Yam ha-okhmah, Netiv ayyim, and De’i okhmah le-nafshekha, is arguably the most innovative mystical voice in Israel. Why are his works resonating so strongly both inside and outside their haredi com- munities of origin? How is his innovative thinking affecting the devotional praxis of devekut both inside and outside the unfolding Hasidic networks? This exploration of mystical apperception through devekut builds upon studies of Garb, Huss, and Meir, while challenging the idea that Morgenstern’s expanding impact is solely a function of his mystical-magical charisma and hypernomian spiritual practice. This study argues that it is Morgenstern’s hybridized thinking through key theoretical issues in Kabbalah and Hasidism as they apply to the lived practice of a devotional life of devekut that will likely remain his strongest innovation and contribution to contemporary Jewish mysticism.

Keywords Contemporary Hasidism; Kabbalah; Haredi networks; Jewish mysticism; nondual consciousness; hybridized thinking; devekut; unio mystica

1.0 Mystical Apperception and Subjectivity

Is touching God possible? Namely, if touching the untouchable is possible, is it permissible? Through the ages Judaism does more than merely suggest its possibility—it exults in the glory of this divine-human

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 JJTP 19.2 Also available online – brill.nl/jjtp DOI: 10.1163/147728511X606183 148 aubrey l. glazer encounter.1 In pursuit of the limitless light of the Inﬁnite One, the mind races and restrains itself while the body quivers and trembles as it is washed over in an oceanic feeling hovering beneath the skin. The mystic remains entranced in this preconceptual dance of unio mystica or devekut that eludes experience, reaching but not reaching, hovering but not hovering, touching but not touching. So how can language render this form of touching which is not touching that remains so pervasive in Jewish mysticism? Does it sufﬁce to contain the cogni- tion and perception into apperception of this experience in a term like devekut? If there are degrees of devekut that have been overlooked,2 then vertigo and exactitude will serve to redress and guide a rediscovery of a neglected but nuanced experience so central to contemporary nondual Jewish mysticism and one of its prime exemplars, Rabbi Yitzhaq Maier Morgenstern.

1 For example, see most recently Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (New York: Beacon Press, 1995); Peter Schäfer, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism, trans. A. Pomerance (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). 2 Scholem is careful in his study on devekut to limit the implications of this unitive experience to an androcentric perspective concerned solely with the role of the human in community: I have said that communion, for all its depth and importance, is not union. . . . But . . . the self within the divine mind . . . pierces through this state on to the rediscovery of man’s spiritual identity. He ﬁnds himself because he has found God. This, then, is the deepest meaning of devekut of which Hasidism knows, and the radical terms should not blind us to the eminently Jewish and person- alistic conception of man which they still cover. After having gone through devekut and union, man is still man—nay, he has, in truth, only then started to be man, and it is only logical that only then will he be called upon to fulﬁll his destiny in the society of men. See Gershom Scholem, “Devekut, or Communion with God,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Press, 1971), 222, 227. For an important revision to Scholem, see Moshe Idel, “Universalization and Integration: Two Conceptions of Mystical Union in Jewish Mysticism,” in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. M. Idel and B. McGinn (New York: Continuum Press, 1989), 33–50, esp. 42–43; and Moshe Idel, “Mystical Techniques,” in Essential Papers on Kabbalah, ed. L. Fine (New York: NYU Press, 1995), esp. 454–62. For a nuanced hermeneutic reading of devekut, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 32, 35, 39, 122, 209, 237, 267, 288, 354, 377. Consider also “Introduction: Kabbalah and Modernity,” in Kabbalah and Modernity, ed. Boaz Huss, Marco Pusi, and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1–12.