Review: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

Reading Scholem again from our precarious vantage point in the age of the information revolution, at the moment of the much-trumpeted breaking of a canon, we may detect in his grand evocation of this strange and in many ways quite alien mystical corpus an exemplary pattern of how viable historical change takes place, how the antithetic tensions of life in culture lay against each other without destroying the continuity of the cultural system.

In this regard, Scholem's searching investigation of the twisting paths of Jewish mysticism makes profoundly instructive reading as we approach the millennium. But he also sees sharply that the mystics, impelled by discernible historical circumstances, very often sought to escape the ordeal of history by withdrawing into a realm of ecstasy and, at worst, delusion.

Scholem's magisterial study is hardly intended to promote a nostalgia for mysticism or any illusion that we can embrace it as it was, but he makes us see the essential role it has played in the Jewish story, and indeed in the human story, and he leads us to ponder what other symbolic languages there might be to express our stubborn sense of connection with eternal things.

From the Foreward to Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
written by Robert Alter
Berkeley, 1995

Gershom Scholem was not a mystic. He was a thorough and compelled educator and researcher who threw himself into an investigation of Jewish mysticism which resulted in Major Trends, a book that is considered to be a major contribution and central tome on the history and nature of the Jewish mystical movements.

Scholem's book is based on the nine Stroock Lectures he presented at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1938 (Major Trends was published just a few years later) and each chapter stands, more or less, on its own, with just a few strings weaving forward and backward to the other material. The book functions as a whirlwind tour of the history of the various flavors of Jewish mysticism and how they developed, from first century Roman Judea and Merkabah mysticism, through 18th and 19th century and Polish/Ukrainian Chasidism. Suffice it to say, the book covers a vast territory. Unless you are already well versed in the different expressions of Jewish mysticism, don't hope to come away with an easily digested summary of what makes up the different mystic traditions. You can read the book cover to cover, but once you've done so, you'll need to do so again, and then you'll use this book as a reference when exploring one or more of the mystic movements in detail.

My own modest introduction to the Jewish mystic tradition was in reading and reviewing Paul Philip Levertoff's Love and the Messianic Age. Levertoff was a Chasidic Jew who lived in the late 19th and into the mid-20th century and who saw the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of John, as a reflection of his own mystic background as a Chasidim. When I read Levertoff and the FFOZ/Vine of David commentary on his work, I began to see frail glimpses of who the Jewish Messiah is through that unusual and elusive lens and I wanted to see and understand more.

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is more; a lot more.

As a non-Jewish Christian and disciple of the Jewish Messiah, I started reading Scholem with an eye on discovering more hidden truths about the Jesus (Yeshua) within his pages and I must say I found those truths...and I didn't.

I have to be careful here. It is easy to find what you're looking for, much like a person panning for gold nuggets, eager to "strike it rich". But does a person searching the river with an eye filled with preconceptions find true gold, or only what looks like gold? That's the dilemma I faced reading Scholem.

I found many dualisms and parallels that seemed to point to Jesus, especially in the earlier mystic traditions, but is he really there? I don't know that I can say "yes" or "no" based on Scholem's rapid and intense coverage of such a broad spectrum of Jewish mysticisms. Right now, I prefer to withhold judgment and to be content learning what there is to learn on Scholem's terms rather than my own. The rest will come, God be willing.

The details of the book are too numerous to document here. I wrote copious notes as I turned each page, but to replicate those notes here would create a novel, not a blog post. The chief benefit of reading Major Trends at this stage of my education is to lay a wide foundation for what comes afterward. I've already started reading my next book, The Way of Kabbalah by Ben Shimon Halevi, and from the very first page, what I had learned from Scholem enabled me to grasp Halevi's description of Kabbalah in a way I couldn't have achieved otherwise (Scholem dedicated two full lectures just to the Zohar).

Scholem seems to leave out no detail or observation as he takes us through history, examining each mystic movement in Judaism. He relates not only the prize, but the peril of pursuing the mystic, and not only the virtues, but the flaws and fallacies of each mystic writer and explorer. As Alter stated in the Foreward, Major Trends is both a Jewish story and a story of human beings striving, sometimes vainly, to pursue God in His "native realm" which lies beyond the boundaries of human perception and existence. Scholem's final lecture ends this way:

The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me. Under what aspects this invisible stream of Jewish mysticism will again come to the surface we cannot tell. But I have come here to speak to you of the main tendencies of Jewish mysticism as we know them. To speak of the mystical course which, in the great cataclysm now stirring the Jewish people more deeply than in the entire history of Exile, destiny may still have in store for us - and I for one believe that there is such a course - is the task of prophets, not of professors.

There's another way to view the course Scholem describes:

If we were Jews because our minds and hearts told us so, then our Judaism would take us only as far as our minds and hearts can know. But we are not. And so, our journey is on eagle’s wings and our destiny beyond the stars.
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
from his short article, "Not by choice"
Chabad.org

Jewish mysticism is not just a Jewish story but a human story. It's a journey to find God using means that go beyond prayer and study. It's a path that leads us outside of our perceptions and even outside our imaginations, and into a set of worlds fantastic and dangerous. Ezekiel saw such worlds. So did John as he describes in the Book of Revelations. Scholem doesn't tell us how to find the road that takes us to these worlds, but he tells us many stories about the men who did. If you want to learn about the mystics who discovered the trail head into the unknown, reading Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is a good place to start.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.