Hasidic Commentary on the Torah [Hardcover]

Hasidism, a movement of religious awakening and social reform, originated in the mid-eighteenth century. After two and a half centuries of crisis, upheaval, and renewal, it remains a vibrant way of life and a compelling aspect of Jewish experience. This book explores the profound intellectual and religious issues that the hasidic masters raised in their Torah commentary, and brings to the fore the living qualities of their sermons (derashot).

Ora Wiskind-Elper addresses a spectrum of topics: creation, revelation, and redemption; hermeneutics, epistemology, psychology, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, art history, Hebrew fiction, cultural history, and tropes of Jewish suffering and hope. Fully engaged in the texts and their spirituality, she brings them to bear on postmodernist challenges to traditional spiritual and religious sensibilities.

This is a comprehensive study, unique in pedagogy, clarity, and originality. It uses the full range of critical scholarship on hasidism as a social and ideological movement. At the same time, it maintains a strong focus on hasidic Torah commentary as a conveyor of theology and value. Each of its chapters presents a fundamentally new approach. Wiskind-Elper's translations are in themselves an innovative moment in the tradition and spiritual history of the passages she offers.

Ora Wiskind-Elper's ability to utilize the fullest range of academic scholarship on Hasidism as a cultural and religious movement, in all its diversity is exemplary, and always done with the stronger focus on the role and dynamics of the Hasidic derashah. . . . [her] choice of thematics - from the self-conception of the masters, to their hermeneutics and use of language and tradition, and including the role of historical or social factors to condition the thematics, is not only superb, but brings to the forefront the living qualities of these spiritual sermons, and demonstrates the powerful hermeneutics at play . . . we get an excellent lC0