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131 Jonathan Garb in the First Volumeof His 2013Intellectualbiography Thelifeandideasof James Hillman, Dick Russell Recounts

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131 Jonathan Garb in the First Volumeof His 2013Intellectualbiography Thelifeandideasof James Hillman, Dick Russell Recounts book reviews 131 Jonathan Garb Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2015. 288 pp. Cloth. $45.00. isbn-10: 022629580x. In the first volume of his 2013 intellectual biography The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Dick Russell recounts this anecdote (pp. 347–348). On a visit to Israel, a young and brazen Hillman phoned Prof. Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem, “to ask him some question about Jewish studies or what [he] should study.” In 2006, Hillman recollected, “the fact that I did this without any background! […] I mean, I didn’t know one word of Hebrew nor had I read one of Scholem’s books!Today I’m ashamed even remembering it.” Of course, Hillman eventually went on to participate with Scholem in the context of the celebrated Eranos conferences in Ascona, Switzerland. Without excusing his earlier audacity, Hillman interpreted his initial overture to the renowned Jewish intellectual historian as an expression of his soul’s ahistorical recognition that it already belonged in Scholem’s company. “For the young man of the time to phone Scholem was such chutzpah. But for the daimon, if we don’t read these things historically, it’s not—somehow, I knew that’s where I belonged.” This statement might suggest that the psychological imperative of under- standing “the daimon” entails reading biographical events outside of the con- straints of historical contingency. Does historical awareness impose certain impediments when it comes to understanding the soul? Certain obstacles to psychological interpretation? In a revised version of a 1968 Eranos lecture pub- lished in his 1972 Myth of Analysis, Hillman argued that psychology should guard against losing sight of its own case history. He maintained that doing history is rather a way of doing psychology—“an act of soul.” (p. 157) Thus, it is in good faith when Jonathan Garb, Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, dedicates his dynamic intellectual his- tory of modern kabbalistic soul discourse to none other than Hillman. Garb’s thought-provoking new monograph, a treasury of copiously documented anal- ysis and new insights, demonstrates that discerning the plurality of modern psychological discourses depends upon viewing soul-matters from an histori- cal perspective. Moreover, Garb’s book embodies the aspiration that a history of soul in modern kabbalistic sources can also, faithful to Hillman, be a history with soul. Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah is its au- thor’s fifth monograph after his 2014 Hebrew language spiritual biography of R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, his 2011 study of shamanic trance in modern kab- balah, and his two 2005 Hebrew language books, respectively titled Manifes- © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700593-01801006 132 book reviews tations of Power in Jewish Mysticism: From Rabbinic Literature to Safedian Kab- balah andThe ChosenWill Become Herds: Studies inTwentieth Century Kabbalah (English trans. 2009). In 2014, Garb was awarded the coveted Gershom Scholem Prize for Kabbalah Scholarship by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humani- ties, and the lecture he delivered on that occasion has now appeared in Hebrew as Modern Kabbalah as an Autonomous Domain of Research (2016). Over the past decade, the author of these erudite works, as well as of an extensive bibli- ography of ground-breaking articles, has emerged as a leading authority in the project of mapping the intellectual topography of modern kabbalah. The book’s central argument is that kabbalah is “a source of modern psy- chological theory and not merely another domain in which it may be applied.” (129) In other words, the author asks his reader to “regard Kabbalah as a form of indigenous knowledge that may contribute to psychology rather than just being interpreted through it.” (20) In telling the story of modern kabbalistic psy- chology, Garb seeks to dislodge the psychoanalytic tradition from its privileged and universalistic application in the study of mysticism. For the author, psy- choanalysis finds its place as one tradition alongside many: “the way forward is to release our dependence on psychoanalysis, and instead bring to the fore- front the indigenous psychological theories developed in the Kabbalistic world that shared the modern period with psychology.” (11–12) This programmatic approach, however, does not prevent the author from frequently translating modern kabbalah’s “indigenous psychological theories” in terms of Hillman’s archetypal psychology. In particular, Garb is drawn to Hillman’s construction of “soul-making.” In his affirmation of the psychological pluralism of the modern period, Garb is guided by Shmuel Eisenstadt’s rubric of “multiple modernities.” (17, 110) Kab- balistic modernity comes into view as one distinctive paradigm, to be coordi- nated with parallel, sometimes competing modernizing trajectories. Through- out Yearnings of the Soul, Garb promotes the view that kabbalistic modernity began with what he terms “the Safedian revolution.” The author qualifies this “revolution,” which took place in the 16th century in the northwestern Galilean village of Safed in Ottoman Palestine, as a “psychological turn.” The book’s sec- ond chapter outlines the novel contributions of Safedian psychology, which it links up with “a decisive intensification in discourse of individuality.” (24) The “revolution,” Garb argues, is supported by an unprecedented set of histor- ical circumstances “that truly inaugurated the modern era in Kabbalah while effecting sharp discontinuity with earlier periods.” (25) Namely, “it is only Safed that can be said to have been the one site of a veritable psychological revolu- tion, manifested in autobiography, hagiography, possession-related phenom- ena, a renewed focus on teshuva (so-called repentance), psychological tech- Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018) 127–152.
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