Garb, Jonathan
Senior Fellow: July–August 2019
Research Project: Doubt and Certainty in Late Modern Kabbalah
Although there are notable studies of the development of scepticism in early modern Jewish thought, no sustained discussion of the place of doubt in the vast literature of modern Kabbalah exists, and there is certainly no differentiation between its various sub-periods. However, the terms safek (doubt) and vaday (for certain) are keywords of modern Kabbalistic rhetoric and phraseology. I shall focus on two later schools, founded by R. Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izbiche and R. Avraham Itzhak H. Kook. The significance of Leiner’s writing is that he presented constant doubt as a legitimate and even central type of religious personality. I hope to place this innovative move in the context of the development of typology in general and religious typology in particular, in late. R. Kook’s already well-recognised importance lies in his explicit, often containing engagement with the cultural manifestations of secularisation. I hope to demonstrate that relatively exhaustive studies of two extensive corpuses can lead to new insights as to the role played by doubt in both cultural and political processes.
Jonathan Garb, Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah, is chair of the department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.