Customer Reviews

Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation

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Absorbing Perfections is the outstanding work on Kabbalah of this generation. It is a serious ( and heavy) academic work that breaks new ground and adds important dimensions to the work of previous scholars such Scholem and Shatz.
Whereas other popular works on Kabbalah lack the serious historical perspectives and mastery of the original texts Moshe Idel is unique. There is no one like him writing about Kabbalah in the Western World today.
If Scholem was too Germanic, detached and disregarding of the experiences and spiritual achievements of Kabbalah, Idel adds all these dimensions to the solid academic foundations.
This book is a hard read, its style is not easy, but if anyone wants a serious understanding of Kabbalah rather than a comic book version, this has to be the book to read.

Harold Bloom in his illumating preface to this work calls it Idel's most monumental and important to date. Bloom sees Idel the way he sees great literary creators as in a kind of 'agon' with their forebearers. All English Romantic poetry tries to contend with and overcome Milton. So all scholars of Kabbalah including Idel must contend with and strive to overcome their great founding predecessor, Gershom Scholem.
As Bloom understands it Idel makes a more continuous reading of the Tradition than does Scholem who gives more weight to transformations in interpretation connected with major historical events, primarily the explusion from Spain. Idel is also celebrated by Bloom by reading the text in the fullest and most absorbing way possible- i.e. by attempting an enrichment of the Tradition as opposed to the post-modern dilution of it.
Idel is an idiosyncratic often difficult writer. But his command of detail and knowledge of the texts are second to none. And his work expands our sense of what Kabbalah and the search for the hidden meanings of the Divine mean in Jewish Tradition.