Garb, Jonathan

Senior Fellow: July–August 2022

Research Project: The Language of Doubt and the Doubts of Language in Modern Kabbalah

This project joins and thus advances earlier investigations into doubt and language in Kabbalah. Within the rubric of language and meaning, its two interrelated themes are the vocabulary and rhetoric of doubt and certainty and the growing doubts about the capacity of language to represent the Kabbalistic universe (and by doing so, to advance the transformative goals of its accompanying practice). On the historical level, the project will conjecture that exposure to scepticism and other open-ended modern epistemologies increasingly undermined the linguistic certainty characterising earlier forms of Kabbalah (strengthening existing tendencies towards paradox). It will also posit that doubt became an increasingly important centre of an entire cluster of terms, mostly of an emotive nature. More broadly put, destabilising moments in modern Kabbalah, such as the Lurianic trope of the breaking of vessels or Sabbatian challenges, can be seen to be far more the norm than the exception. In addition to these outcomes, this project hopes to add a chapter to the little-researched histories of the Kabbalistic dictionary and rhetorical strategies. The plan is to complete a book discussing late modern texts on doubt soon after the proposed summer period of the fellowship, accompanied by an article on early modern sources.

Jonathan Garb is a professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.