Suckling at My Mother's Breasts: The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism

Notes

Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. The edition of Sefer ha-Zohar used in this study is Reuven Moshe Margaliot, ed., Sefer ha-Zohar al Hamishah Humshei Torah, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1999). All text translations from Hebrew and Aramaic are my own, unless otherwise stated. 2. Georges Bataille describes this process beautifully. “The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved ) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the unknown.” Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. and with an introduction by Leslie Ann Boldt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), 5. 3. Melila Hellner-Eshed identifies “flow” as one of Sefer ha-Zohar’s most central metaphors, noting that it relates to divine overflow, universal structure, erotic dynamics and the workings of human consciousness. Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 230. 4. For example, in this work the term suckling mother indicates a mother who breastfeeds, not a mother who is the recipient of breastfeeding. 5. Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 120–23, 133. 111 112 Notes to the Introduction 6. By rabbinic literature, I mean both aggadic and halakhic texts from the time of the earliest rabbis through the Middle Ages. Works that I group under this term do not fall into other literary categories composed by rabbinic authors—such as philosophical, ethical, and kabbalistic writings. 7. Arthur Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context ,” AJS Review 26, no. 1 (2002); Peter Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 159–65. Also see Peter Schäfer, “Daughter, Sister, Bride, and Mother: Images of the Femininity of God in the Early Kabbala,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 2 (2000): 221–42. 8. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 249. 9. Hereafter, I will shorten the title rabbi with the commonly used abbreviation, R. 10. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 117–19. 11. Babylonian Talmud will be abbreviated BT. 12. Brackets in translated texts contain words that are implied by the text or are necessary for grammatical clarification, but are not actually present in the text itself. In this instance, they contain both grammatical clarifications and the next phrase of the Song of Songs, which Ezra’s readers would have known without seeing the words written. 13. Charles Chavel, ed., “Perush le-Shir ha-Shirim,” in Kitve Rabenu Moshe ben Nahman, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 2002), 473–518. 14. Daniel Abrams also stresses the need to evaluate how kabbalistic ideas arise from within rabbinic culture before seeking to explain them through outside influence. Although I do not share his ideological emphasis on preserving Jewish thought’s inherent Jewishness or his position on American universities (which he perceives as undermining Jewish thought’s independent character), I agree Notes to the Introduction 113 with him that it is important to understand how internal trends in Jewish thought give rise to innovations. Tracing these internal trends allows for a fuller evaluation of Jewish thought’s character as both proactive and reactive. Daniel Abrams, “The Virgin Mary as the Moon That Lacks the Sun: A Zoharic Polemic Against the Veneration of Mary,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 21 (2010): 15–16. 15. For a helpful resource on intertextuality in Jewish texts, see Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (np Bloomington , IN: Indiana University Press, 1990; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001). 16. Sherry Ortner, “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist 75 (1973): 1339. 17. Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 49; Elliot Wolfson, “Occultation of the Feminine and the...