Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Taubman Lectures in Jewish Studies) [Hardcover]

Elliot R. Wolfson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520246195 | ISBN-13: 978-0520246195 | Publication Date: April 5, 2006 | Edition: 1

This highly original, provocative, and poetic work explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western philosophy is far more intimate and extensive than any previous scholar has ever suggested, Elliot R. Wolfson draws an extraordinary range of thinkers such as Frederic Jameson, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, William Blake, Julia Kristeva, Friedrich Schelling, and a host of kabbalistic figures into deep conversation with one another. Alef, Mem, Tau also discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time.
The framework for Wolfson's examination is the rabbinic teaching that the word emet, "truth," comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, alef, mem, and tau, which serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of time--past, present, and future. By heeding the letters of emet we discern the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth. The time of death does not mark the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken--between, before, beyond.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wolfson's treatment of the concept of time is both stimulating and original. Methodologically and conceptually rich, the scholarship exhibited in this book is exemplary. The style is engaging and dynamic, and captures the fresh and vital quality of the series of talks from which the book emerged." - Hindy Najman, author of Second Seconding: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism"

From the Inside Flap

"Wolfson's treatment of the concept of time is both stimulating and original. Methodologically and conceptually rich, the scholarship exhibited in this book is exemplary. The style is engaging and dynamic, and captures the fresh and vital quality of the series of talks from which the book emerged."--Hindy Najman, author of Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 342 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520246195
• ISBN-13: 978-0520246195
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,059,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Talmudic Poetics Revised, January 4, 2007

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This review is from: Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Taubman Lectures in Jewish Studies) (Hardcover)

With this creative philosophical and religious study on the interrelationship between truth, death, and time, Wolfson continues to create a new form of academic hybrid discourse that blends insights from the esoteric kabbala with philosophical speculations derived from a host of top-flight thinkers. Though the tone of these lectures is rigorously academic, regaled with subtle allusions, ironic wordplay, excessive citation from a stellar cast of contemporary and arcane sources and authorities, Wolfson is not without a playful and even poetic adventuresomeness, that is willing to dabble between the in accident of abstractions in the metaphor of images. To these initial three lectures in this published version, Wolfson has added two hefty introductory chapters. The first outlines the philosophical sources that have shaped his hermeneutical understanding of time, and which generally necessitates a temporal understanding of the nature of hermeneutics the second offers a conception of temporality, culled from a wide range of kabbalistic texts, that serves as a backdrop for the specific analysis is in the three chapters on alef/past, mem/present, tau/future. Elliott takes most of his textual reasoning from two main kabbalistic anthologies which can be viewed as the limits of kabbala stick literary activity from the 12th and 13th centuries: Sefer ha-Bahir and the Sefer ha-Zohar. His choice of these texts is deliberate: the mesh radical disposition exhibited in the Bahiric parallels in the so zoharic homilies provides a particularly useful prism through which to consider a narratological conception of temporality that defies the doctrinaire distinction between truth and appearance, reality and imagination.

Wolflson is exploring the realm between the signifier and the signified, which in postmodern times has enjoyed an erasure following the evaporation of certain essences. The impossibility of certainly locating presence "-- the rallying call postmodern hermeneutics -- is inseparable from the impossibility of absence in his match as there can be no presents but in the presence of absence, just as there can be no absence but in the absence of presents." In the third chapter which was the first of lectures, Wolfson explores the paradox of beginning: to begin, and beginning needs to have to began to be the beginning it is to be, but if this is so, then he would not be and beginning it must be if it is the beginning of what it is to be. Here we have the mystery of doubling as encoded in the opening letter of the first verse Genesis begins Torah, beit. This is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the cipher for the number two. Beginning is symbolized by beit, but before beit there is alef, the mystery, pele. (Rabbinic anagram).

The central point for Wolfson is to show how time can be the means of conquering time. Starting with the symbolic world of the medieval kabbala, it is not confined himself to one work or historical epoch but rather develops a thematic approach based on the three Hebrew letters to point to the space of a timeline. Following the imaginative thinking of his kabbala stick sources, Wolfson seeks to articulate an ontology of time that is a grammar of becoming. The correlation of truth and divinity underscores the truth, which embodies its hermeneutical constellation of the triadic temporality, is a mark of the divine eternally becoming in time. This is a formulation that is still too dichotomous, as the divine becoming is not an event in time but the eventuality of time, an eventuality instantiated in the momentous or rupture of the moment where life and death converge in the coming to be of that which endures everlastingly and the endurance of that which comes to be provisionally. This insight becomes the central truth for Wolfson that time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the and is that figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth, the closure that opens of the opening that closes. In many ways, Wolfson attempts to show us that the kabbalistic tradition fosters an understanding of the radical becoming of time-being in its being-time, and interruptive narration that militates against the feasibility of constructing a contemporaneous myth in which past, present, and future converge in an absolute that is all-in-all. In other words, the time of death bespeaks not the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken - between, before, beyond.

Obviously, Wolfson's musings are so embedded in the kabbalist tradition and in contemporary thinking, especially in postmodernist abstract jargon, that only someone well-versed in the literature will find his insights especially illuminating and playfully insightful and poetic.