Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press Jewish Culture and Creativity Essays in Honor of Professor Michael Fishbane on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday Edi ted by Eitan P. F ishbane & Elis h a Rus s - Fis h ban e BOSTON 2023 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945515 Copyright © 2023, Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved ISBN 9798887193069 (hardback) ISBN 9798887193076 (ebook PDF) ISBN 9798887193083 (ePub) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services. Cover design by Ivan Grave. On the cover: A page from Rothschild Mahzor, MS 8892 folio 128v, The JTS Library’s Special Collections. Reproduced by permission. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press Contents Preface Eitan P. Fishbane and Elisha Russ-Fishbane 1. The Spiritual Vocation of a Teacher: A Meditation Michael Fishbane vii 1 Bible and History of Interpretation 2. 3. 4. Monotheism and Anthropopathism in Hosea 11: Divine Personhood vs. Immutability in Biblical Theology Benjamin Sommer Before Eilu va’eilu: The Pentateuchal Anthology and Tolerance of Difference Elsie R. Stern The Isaiah Bulla, Jeremiah the Priest/Prophet, and Reinterpreting the Prophet (nby’) in the Persian Scribal Community William Schniedewind 7 22 36 Classical Rabbinic Literature 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Eden Lost and Regained: Mythmaking in Midrash Deborah Green Gehinnom’s Punishments in Classical Rabbinic Literature Dov Weiss Problematizing the Midrashic Book in an Imperial Landscape Natalie B. Dohrmann Substitutes for Sacrifice, Community Stewardship, and Rabbinic Paideia: Tractates Tithes and Second Tithe of the Mishnah Jonathan Schofer Thinking Gender through Grammar: BT Qiddushin, 2a–3b Jane L. Kanarek 55 77 91 108 123 Medieval and Early Modern Religious Thought and Literature 10. Exegetical Palimpsests: The Eros and Mythos of Poetic Intertextuality Laura S. Lieber 139 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press vi Jew ish Culture and Creativ ity 11. Beyond “Intention” in Ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Hearts” Omer Michaelis 12. Songs to the Soul in Medieval Hebrew Poetry Elisha Russ-Fishbane 13. Pronouncing Words, Creating Worlds: Form and Matter in Joseph Giqatilla’s Hermeneutics Tzvi Schoenberg 14. The Power of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Power: Physiognomy and the Masters of Secrets in the Zohar Ellen Haskell 15. Mystical Autobiography in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah Eitan P. Fishbane 154 167 182 196 211 Modern Religious Thought and Literature 16. Child Mind in H.asidic Spirituality Sam S. B. Shonkoff 17. These Gates Open to the Longings of the Heart Ora Wiskind 18. Emotion, Autonomy, and the Mind in the Piaseczner Rebbe James Jacobson-Maisels 19. “An Upside Down World”: The Concept of America in H.aredi Theology Nathaniel Deutsch 20. Five Dimensions of Dignity: Jonathan Sacks on Judaism and the Human Condition Dov Lerner 21. The Forgetting of Isaac David N. Gottlieb 22. Pedagogies of PaRDeS: Michael Fishbane’s Jewish Hermeneutical Theology as a Vision of Contemporary Spiritual Education Daniel Marom 23. Encounters across the Ages at the Edge of Childhood: Learning from “Modern Jewish Thought” Rebecca Schorsch 24. Strategic Discretion: Game Theory Models for Interactions of Transgender Jews and Their Orthodox Rabbis Hillel Gray Bibliography of the Writings of Professor Michael Fishbane General Index Index of Sources 233 249 264 278 294 309 323 338 354 369 385 396 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 16 Child Mind in H.asidic Spirituality Sam S. B. Shonkoff Ah, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now. —Bob Dylan1 I am very old, and I am still completely infantile. I have not yet begun to live at all, and I am nonetheless very old. —Nah.man of Bratzlav2 Reflecting on Michael Fishbane’s eightieth birthday while also caring for my firstborn baby, I am struck in new ways by my teacher’s meditations on “natality.” For Fishbane, natality is “the spring of beginnings that comes with a reborn mindfulness,” and he casts it as key for a contemporary theological breakthrough.3 Admittedly, he is not speaking literally about infants—at least not in any simple sense. Indeed, he adapts the term “natality” from Hannah Arendt, for whom it represented the possibility of free, spontaneous action despite the dominating superstructures of society.4 And yet, for Fishbane, 1 Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages,” Another Side of Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1964), track 8. I thank Daniel Boyarin for bringing these lyrics to my attention. 2 Nah.man of Bratzlav, “The Seven Beggars,” in his Sipurei Ma‘asiyot (Beitar ‘Ilit: Makhon Even Shetiyah, 2001), 360–1. All translations are my own, unless cited otherwise. 3 Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), ix–x. 4 See ibid., 213f. Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 234 Sam S. B. Shonkoff neonatal experience is more than metaphor. A central pillar of his theology is that moments of preverbal immediacy remind us just how heavily mediated our everyday cognition is. “Simply think of the primordial processes each childhood repeats,” he marvels. “The whir of noise and the blur of shapes are sensate, eerie elements from the very start, and are only gradually routinized into sensible patterns by the touch of parental care and the wave tones of intimate sounds.”5 That “whir” and “blur” of childlike sensation stir us to see that we are always already interpreting an ineffable vastness. For Fishbane, this insight should be primary for, and in dialectical tension with, theological expression.6 In contrast, the normative texts of Jewish tradition tend to portray young children as not-yet-adults, if the sources speak about them at all. There are expressions of excitement for them to grow up and perform actions of Torah study, marriage, and righteous deeds, but one is hard-pressed to find classical sources that draw inspiration from young children themselves as they are. Deena Aranoff argues persuasively that lived realities of childhood and childrearing (mothering, in particular) are often between the lines of texts, as it were, metaphorically appropriated into the foundations of rabbinic theology and practice—but these remain overwhelmingly implicit.7 Early H. asidism broke from this trend in significant ways. According to various teachings and testimonies, the movement’s generator, the Ba‘al Shem Tov (Besht), rebelled against soulless study and unfeeling intellectualism.8 In contrast to the 5 Ibid., 16. 6 For more detailed discussion of these foundations of Fishbane’s theology, see my “Michael Fishbane: An Intellectual Portrait,” in Michael Fishbane: Jewish Hermeneutical Theology, Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers, ed. Aaron W. Hughes and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 33–40. For echoes of natality in Fishbane’s more recent writings, see Michael Fishbane, Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 108–9. 7 See Deena Aranoff, “Mother’s Milk: Child-Rearing and the Production of Jewish Culture,” Journal of Jewish Identities 12, no. 1 (2019): 1–17; idem, “The Biblical Root ‘mn: Retrieval of a Term and Its Household Context,” in Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, ed. Marjorie Lehman, Jane L. Kanarek, and Simon J. Bronner (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017), 327–41. 8 For a well-known narrative representation of this value, see where the Besht repeatedly frustrates the Maggid of Mezritsch’s efforts to extract intellectual disquisitions from him, responding rather with seemingly mundane anecdotes about interactions with commoners, and then finally critiques the Maggid’s mode of study as “without soul.” Aaron of Apta, Keter Shem Tov (Zholkva, 1794/5), fols. 30a–30b. As Moshe Idel explains, “The difference between the Besht and the Great Maggid was, it seems, not a matter of knowledge of the topics dealt with . . . or their ability to read the text, but the special way it had to be recited; a text should be studied not only for the sake of its content but for the experience it is able to induce.” Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 172. Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press C h i l d M i n d i n H. a s i d i c S p i r i t u a l i t y scholarly ideals of eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jewish culture, he intimated that obsession with esoterica can thwart spiritual connection. Indeed, for the Besht, neither textual knowledge nor basic literacy are necessary preconditions for the joy and trembling of spiritual connection.9 As Gershom Scholem notes about devequt (flushness with God), the pinnacle of spiritual consciousness in H. asidism, “thought is transformed into emotion” and it is wholly “de-intellectualized.”10 The Besht’s celebration of the “simple person” (tam) is a much discussed expression of this perspective. A rather overlooked image, though, is that of the child. This article explores expressions of “child mind” in early h.asidic spirituality. In truth, much like the contemporaneous romanticization of children in Romantic literature, the theological sources we will examine say more about adults than they do about actual children.11 Ultimately, “child mind” is a decidedly grownup affair. Thus, as Carolyn Steedman notes, “It is helpful to make an analytic separation between real children, living in the time and space of particular societies, and the ideational and figurative force of their existence.”12 The former always inform the latter, of course, but we will focus specifically on how adult H. asidim envisaged childlikeness. Thus, for our purposes, child mind refers precisely to the textures of children’s (including babies’) inner experiences, as imagined by adults in their own personal quests for meaning. A common ideal in this vein is a sort of beginner’s mind, where everything is new. However, as we shall see, h.asidic ruminations expand far beyond this frame. It is worth emphasizing that most of these diverge quite self-consciously from assertions 9 The Besht’s (alleged) celebrations of spiritual simplicity connect to various aspects of his general approach, including (1) his democratization of the historically elitist concept of devequt; (2) his shift from the elaborate system of Lurianic kavanot to more affective-ecstatic notions of kavanah; (3) his emphasis on letters, as opposed to words, in prayer and study; and (4) his self-image as a leader of the entire Jewish people. See, inter alia, Gershom Scholem, “Devekut, or Communion with God,” in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism, trans. Michael Meyer (New York: Schocken, 1995), 203–27; Rachel Elior, The Mystical Origins of Hasidism (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 78–84; Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 106–10, 129–31; Joseph Weiss, Studies in East European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, ed. David Goldstein (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), 56–61, 95–105; Tsippi Kauffman, Be-Khol Derakhekha Da‘eihu: Tefisat ha-Elohut ve-ha-‘Avodah be-Gashmiyut be-Reishit ha-H.asidut (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2009), 399–407; David Biale et al., Hasidism: A New History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 55–7. 10 Scholem, “Devekut, or Communion with God,” 218. 11 Questions of how these related shifts in Romanticism and H. asidism may have been genealogically or structurally correlated are beyond the scope of this article. That said, their intriguing simultaneity should add to the growing discussion of H. asidism as a modern movement. 12 Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5. 235 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 236 Sam S. B. Shonkoff about literal age, instead using language of developmental phases to represent different psychological-spiritual states. It is also crucial to flag from the outset that early h.asidic writings on child mind are exclusively from male perspectives, given the patriarchal structures of that movement.13 Undoubtedly, their reflections—as well as my own analyses thereof in this article—would be far richer if women’s voices had been heeded and recorded. Allusions to child mind appear in the earliest strata of h.asidic spirituality. When the Besht found himself spiritually constricted or directionless, he would infuse his prayer practice with a sense of infancy in order to recenter. Ya‘aqov Yosef of Polnoye, whose writings offer crucial windows into his thought, related, “I heard from my teacher [the Besht] that after Rabbi Neh.unyah ben ha-Qanah14 mastered all the [kabbalistic] intentions (kavanot), he would pray like a day-old infant.”15 The Besht himself emulated this practice, which for him meant “connecting himself to the letters” of liturgy and thereby praying “from within the script itself like a day-old infant.”16 In contrast to earlier kabbalistic techniques of prayer, based on intricate permutations of letters and theosophical secrets, the Besht promoted a less cerebral approach wherein practitioners direct their attention quite sensorially to the black letters themselves. This essential practice was not an intellectual-conceptual endeavor so much as a visual-affective experience.17 It demanded a relinquishment of cleverness in order to behold the letters with total absorption—like a baby who does not even seek to decipher those shapes. And given the Besht’s description of Neh.unyah ben ha-Qanah’s trajectory, such immediacy should be understood as a highly advanced form of prayer. However, child mind served as an ideal for the Besht’s vision of spiritual life more broadly. Commenting on the biblical verse “Do not cast me off at the time of old age (ziqnah)” (Psalm 71:9), he highlighted the hazards of 13 See Ada Rapoport-Albert, “On Women in Hasidism: S. A. Horodetsky and the Maid of Ludmir Tradition,” in her Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2018), 318–67; Marcin Wodzinski, “Women and Hasidism: A ‘Non-Sectarian’ Perspective,” Jewish History 27, nos. 2–4 (2013): 399–434. 14 Neh.unyah ben ha-Qanah was a Tanna of the second century. Medieval Kabbalists pseudepigraphically attributed to him Sefer ha-Bahir and the prayer Ana be-Koah.. 15 Ya‘aqov Yosef of Polnoye, Ketonet Pasim (Lvov, 1866), Balaq, 43a. 16 Ibid., 43b. 17 See Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 183–4; Gershom Scholem, “Devekut, or Communion with God,” in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism, trans. Michael Meyer (New York: Schocken, 1995), 215; Joseph Weiss, “Torah Study in Early Hasidism,” Studies in East European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, ed. David Goldstein (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), 60–61; Louis Jacobs, “Aspects of Scholem’s Study of Hasidism,” in Gershom Scholem, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 186–87. Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press C h i l d M i n d i n H. a s i d i c S p i r i t u a l i t y “oldness” as a spiritual state. According to the Maggid of Mezritsh, the Besht warned specifically about times when “your limbs feel heavy as if you are an old man.” For the Maggid, this pertains not to literal age but rather to a mode of consciousness—namely, when you are preoccupied with earthliness (that is, materiality), as opposed to the more “subtle and animate” elements of being.18 The antidote to this oldness is to connect oneself to the lightest element of all, fire. This will enable you to pray with youthful “fieriness” (hitlahavut).19 The Besht’s grandson Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim of Sudilkov expanded upon his grandfather’s interpretation of Psalm 71:9 in a different register: One who believes in God can pray every day. For if you believe that God always renews the works of creation every day, and each day is a new creation and all the worlds are created anew, then you [feel the] need to pray and give praise and gratitude to the One who created everything and, indeed, created you to pray for your soul, for the souls of your wife and children, for prosperity and wellbeing. If you do not trust with full faith that the blessed Holy One renews the works of creation every day, then prayer and the commandments become to you like an old, habitual thing, and you will get bored saying a few words day after day. This is what my master, my ancestor, my elder [the Besht] said about the verse “Do not cast me off at the time of old age” (Ps. 71:9). He interpreted it to mean that the thing grows old to you. Just as old age causes weakness throughout a person’s limbs due to the diminishing of their strength, fluids, and blood circulation that enliven the human being, so too in spirituality: an old, timeworn thing has no great pleasure or vitality. It is entirely different for something that is new.20 According to Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim, “old age” is boredom and uninspired action. Youthfulness, in contrast, is attunement to novelty. In Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim’s experience, one’s concept of creation is key. If you see creation as a 18 For insights into both the social and intellectual valences of “oldness” in earlier Jewish discourse, see Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Ageing in Medieval Jewish Culture (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022). This book is exemplary for future scholarship on ageing in modern Jewish contexts, including H. asidism. 19 Dov Ber of Mezritsh, Or ha-’Emet (Zhitomir, 1900), ‘Eqev, 16b–17a. 20 Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim of Sudilkov, Degel Mah.aneh Efrayim (Satmar, 1941), ‘Eqev, 85a. 237 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 238 Sam S. B. Shonkoff past event, then the world appears as essentially fixed and unchanging, and your prayer will feel like antiquated tradition. However, if creation is always unfurling anew, then so too is your whole life, and prayerful words will roll off your tongue. “Do not cast me off at the time of old age” is a call for youthful spirit. More than an allusion to any particular prayer technique, this is an all-encompassing principle for spiritual existence. Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim seems to imply that just as the world is always changing, so too should the mental-emotional textures of your practice. His contemporary Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, a student of the Maggid of Mezritsh, affirmed this quite audaciously: Every Jew is obligated to seek [God’s] oneness and unity, without ever letting their soul go limp for even a moment. This is the whole of human life, the very purpose of creation. And yet, we lack the breadth of mind needed to know and understand how to rouse our spirits in each and every moment. We see from our own experience that sometimes you can serve God in a particular way, but as time passes this approach falls into oldness—its time has passed and it is not as important and beloved as it once was. [Thus] the Besht used to say what we now say: “Do not cast us off at the time of old age” (Ps. 71:9). . . . He interpreted this to mean, “May time not cast you into oldness.” For sometimes a person’s practice falls into oldness due to the passage of time.21 For Ze’ev Wolf, a living practice must be ever-growing without growing old—in other words, it must be repeatedly reborn. This is not to say that one should literally deviate from the traditional commandments. Rather, one must constantly seek new ways of enacting them. Indeed, it is not the law itself that deteriorates but one’s relation to it. Whereas Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim had emphasized this in term of the protean nature of creation, Ze’ev Wolf conveys it in terms of the fluctuating faces of God: “May your youth be renewed like that of the eagle” (Ps. 103:5). Our sages were roused to comment that the eagle sheds its feathers [lit. wings] every thousand years and renews its youth, 21 Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, Or ha-Me’ir (Korez., 1798), Yitro, 53a–b. Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press C h i l d M i n d i n H. a s i d i c S p i r i t u a l i t y etc.22 “Feathers” indicate a sort of garment. It is well known that all of our devotion, including the actual commandments, is nothing other than a garment. . . . A person of true insight knows that even the different appearances in which God’s face is “garbed” for the sake of human worship all lead to the same place, indicating His blessed oneness. It is for our sake that the Creator appears in such varied garments, so that each living person may constantly awaken the inner heart to ever new dimensions. When the dimension in which you now serve falls into oldness for you, switch it for another kind of garment—this will grant you new insight.23 Wakeful practitioners let God be unknown. Beyond illusions of familiarity and mastery swirl ever-unprecedented whirls of world, revelation, and life. Openness to this radical mutability renews the spiritual state called youthfulness. You will be like the “eagle” (or phoenix) who sustains that ceaseless dialectic of growing and shedding, growing and shedding, “returning to his youth as he grows old.”24 Conversely, if you wrap yourself in blankets of certainty, then you descend into oldness. Both Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim and Ze’ev Wolf, two peers in a most formative phase of H. asidism, shared this perspective on child mind and rooted it in the teachings of the Besht. The Besht’s great-grandson (and Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim’s nephew) Nah.man of Bratzlav formulated the matter in bold terms: “It is not good to be old, whether you are an old z.addiq or an old H. asid. Oldness is not good, for you must renew yourself every day and begin anew in every moment.”25 Nah.man introduced astonishing new perspectives on child mind. A most provocative example is an anecdote from his journey to the Land of Israel, wherein he literally behaved like a child in the streets of Istanbul.26 However, let us focus primarily on Nah.man’s 22 See Rashi on Ps. 103:5. For a correlated tradition about the “phoenix” (h.ol), see Genesis Rabbah 19:5. Cf. Radak’s commentary on Isaiah 40:31. 23 Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, Or ha-Me’ir, 53a–b, translated in Ariel Evan Mayse and Sam Berrin Shonkoff, eds., Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community, and Life in the Modern World (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2020), 42–43. 24 Rashi on Ps. 103:5. 25 Natan Sternhartz, Sih.ot ha-RaN ( Jerusalem, 1994), 65–66 (§51). 26 Natan Sternhartz, Shivh.ei ha-RaN (Beitar ‘Ilit: Makhon Even Shetiyah, 2009), 36–37 (§12); idem, H.ayyei MoHaRaN (Lviv, 1874), vol. 1, §11, 21b. On the theological significance of this childishness, see Zvi Mark, Mist.iqah ve-Shiga‘on bi-Yez.irat R. Nah.man mi-Breslov (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 2003), 304–6. On such youthful, mischievous “games” in H. asidism more broadly, see David Assaf, “‘A girl! He ought to be whipped’: The Hasid as Homo Ludens,” Polin Studies in Polish Jewry 33, no. 1 (2021): 51–75. 239 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 240 Sam S. B. Shonkoff narration of child mind in his tale “The Seven Beggars,” which he began telling in spring 1810, just months before he died.27 The key moment is a monologue by the first beggar, who is blind. It takes place, strangely enough, at the wedding of two “children.” After the bride and groom cry out in their longing to see the blind man who had helped them when they were lost in the forest, he arrives and offers them a “sermon-gift” (droshe geshank): May you live a long life like me! You think that I am blind? I am not blind at all. It is just that all the world’s time doesn’t amount to even a blink of an eye for me (therefore, he seems like a blind man because he never looks upon the world at all, since all the world’s time doesn’t amount to even a blink of an eye for him, and thus neither looking nor seeing in this world pertained to him at all). I am very old, but I am still completely infantile.28 I have not yet started to live at all, but I am nonetheless very old. And it is not only I myself who says this; I have a confirmation of it from the great eagle.29 The blind man then proceeds to tell a story that elucidates his paradoxical selfdescription. In this tale within a tale, a shipwrecked group alights upon a tower that sustains them with bountiful goods. One day, they decide to share their very earliest memories, and the oldest among them are invited to speak first. The oldest person hints in symbolic terms that he remembers the cutting of his umbilical cord, and the sages there affirm, “This is indeed a very old story.” However, as the speakers descend in age, their memories (always garbed in symbolic language involving fruit) prove ever more primordial. The second oldest one hints that he remembers being in the womb; the third oldest remembers the moment of conception; the fourth oldest remembers the orgasm before fertilization; the fifth oldest remembers when the semen was still in the brain;30 and the next three speakers remember increasingly subtle forms of “soul” (nefesh, ruah., and neshamah). Finally, the blind beggar, who was then only a baby (tinoq), says 27 Nah.man of Bratzlav, Sipurei Ma‘asiyot, 349–443. On the timing of this tale, see Natan Sternhartz, Yemei MaHaRNaT (Beitar ‘Ilit: Makhon Even Shetiyah, 2009), 73 (§42). 28 My translation “infantile” is based on the Hebrew term, yaniq. The Yiddish word used is yung (“young,” “child”). However, as we shall see, the degree of youngness here literally cannot be overstated. Moreover, a different term is used in this story to describe the “children” getting married (banim in Hebrew, kinder in Yiddish), so my translation preserves this distinction. 29 Nah.man of Bratzlav, Sipurei Ma‘asiyot, 359–61. 30 This draws upon Galen’s second-century claim that semen originates in the brain, an idea that remained common for well over a millennium. Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press C h i l d M i n d i n H. a s i d i c S p i r i t u a l i t y that he recalls all of these phenomena but also remembers “nothing at all”—the infinite Nothing prior to being. Thus, the infant is the eldest elder.31 Following this climax, an eagle swoops in and confirms that the baby “is truly the oldest of all.”32 At the end of this tale within the tale, the eagle says to him, “You are like me, since you are very old but still completely infantile, and you have not yet started to live at all, but you are nonetheless very old.”33 On one level, this convergence of oldness and infancy reflects kabbalistic dynamics.34 The nine individuals who share their memories represent different stations in the chain of being, from absolute transcendence to the onset of corporeality. In sefirotic terms, this chain extends from the “nothing” of Keter through the connective “umbilical cord” of Yesod. In Lurianic terms, it reaches from the divine countenance known variously as the “Long-Faced One,” “Holy Ancient One,” and “Elder (of Elders)” through the lower countenance called the “Short-Faced One,” the child aspect of God where consciousness (moh.in) is continually reborn through processes of “pregnancy,” “nursing,” and “weaning.”35 In this genealogy of being, what is closer to nothing is older, and what is closer to corporeality is younger. At the same time, though, all of these spheres and faces are interfused in divine oneness: Infancy is the downstream swelling of ancestral vapors, emanating from the elder of all elders. The blind beggar, likely a reflection of Nah.man himself,36 encompasses this whole cascade and is, therefore, both “very old” and “completely infantile.” He is mirrored as well in that ageless eagle whom we met earlier in Ze’ev Wolf ’s teaching, whose youth is constantly pluming across the millennia. Nah.man’s primary disciple and scribe, Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov, hailed his rebbe’s “Seven Beggars” story as “the most awesome and greatest tale of all.”37 He was especially taken with the blind beggar and wrote a lengthy, forty-five-section sermon on his paradoxical mode of being.38 In doing so, he penned the most in-depth and multifaceted meditation on child mind in h.asidic 31 For the symbolic expressions of the memories and the eagle’s allegorical interpretations thereof, see Sipurei Ma‘asiyot, 364–69, 371–72. 32 Ibid., 371. 33 Ibid., 373. 34 See Natan Sternhartz, Liqutei Halakhot ( Jerusalem: Makhon Or la-Yesharim, 2018), vol. 2: ’Orah. H.ayyim, hilkhot tefilin, halakhah 5, 105–280. This sermon will be cited hereafter as LH. 35 On these parz.ufim, see Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 139–41. 36 See Ora Wiskind-Elper, Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 270, n. 52. 37 Sternhartz, Yemei MaHaRNaT, 71 (§40). 38 LH, 105–280. On this source as a “sermon” (drush), see ibid., 278. 241 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 242 Sam S. B. Shonkoff literature. It is no coincidence that this comes in the form of a treatise on tefilin (phylacteries). For Natan, the blind beggar’s image of constant rebirth alludes to the continual reproduction of consciousness (moh.in) within/from God, and, following Lurianic traditions, he suggests that placing tefilin on one’s head opens channels from pre-conscious headwaters above to the reborn mind below.39 At the same time, the straps hanging from those tefilin, dangling down to the navel, correspond to the umbilical cord, whose severance marks the beginning of life. For Natan, then, donning tefilin is a daily dawning of vitality at all levels of being. The blind beggar, who spans all stages from fertile transcendence through fleshly existence, is the archetype of this process. “The essence of the tefilin’s illumination that extends upon us through the straps emerges from the consciousness (moah.) of the elder who remembers all of this. For it is from him that you receive the power to renew your vitality in every moment, as if today you are born, your umbilical cord is being cut, and you are beginning your life.”40 For Natan, this cosmic-ritual efflorescence is also to be integrated psychologically into everyday life—and here is where his perspective on child mind streams forth most robustly, drawing selectively upon Nah.man’s writings while interweaving them with earlier h.asidic formulations in his own hermeneutical tapestry. Let us examine the core contours. First and foremost, for Natan, childlike consciousness has a quality that, following Shunryū Suzuki, we might call “beginner’s mind.”41 Of course, this echoes sentiments we saw earlier in the thought of Moshe H. ayyim Efrayim and Ze’ev Wolf. Natan locates this at the very heart of Nah.man’s way. Regarding the central subject of this sermon—the blind beggar’s blessing for “long life” in the form of being both old and infantile—Natan writes, “Behold the essential meaning of these matters in the form of an anecdote: It is what I saw and heard various times from the mouth of our Rebbe himself, that he lived a new vitality in every moment. As I heard from him several times, ‘Today I lived a life that is like no life I have ever lived before.’”42 In part, Natan explains, Nah.man’s capacity to perpetually begin living was rooted in his recognition that our inner lives are always changing. “Life” proves to be a blunt term that masks multiplicity: 39 Associations between the tefilin of the head and the upper sefirot of divine mind appear as well in earlier Kabbalistic sources. See, for example, Ezra ben Shlomo of Gerona, Peirush ‘al Shir ha-Shirim (Altona, 1764), fol. 10a; Azriel of Gerona, Peirush ha-Agadot, ed. Isaiah Tishby ( Jerusalem: Meqitsei Nirdamim, 1945), 4–5. 40 LH, 166. 41 Shunryū Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, ed. Trudy Dixon (New York: Walker, 1970). 42 LH, 118. Cf. Sternhartz, H.ayyei MoHaRaN, vol. 1, 2a, 3b. Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press C h i l d M i n d i n H. a s i d i c S p i r i t u a l i t y [Nah.man] spoke extensively about the phenomenon that all the world simply calls “life,” etc., even though there are many types of lives of distress, [let alone types of life in general,] etc. . . .43 In truth, the essence of “life” is a long, real life, in the sense of the blind man’s aforementioned “long life.” He lived a long, real life and thus prided himself in being very old and still very infantile and not yet having started to live at all.44 Attention to the kaleidoscopic quality of experience reveals that so-called “life” is a profoundly unstable category. This defamiliarization, in turn, nourishes the possibility of a “long, real life”—“long” because it is always beginning and thus infused with eternity, and “real” because it is actually how things are. For Natan, this “long life” exudes an ever-embryonic vitality, resistant to linguistic domestication. As Lulu Miller writes in relation to her baby’s entrance into speech, “unlabeled things gnaw and tug at you with more vigor, their parts and powers somehow more alive when they are left to roam wild, outside of the confines of our words. With the name comes a kind of dormancy. The name, in this metaphor, is a trap. It’s the lid on the jar that extinguishes the firefly.”45 Long, real life is what glows in the rawness of what happens, ever unknown. Moreover, for Natan, it is not only personal experience but also the universe itself that morphs in every moment. Indeed, this is the doctrine of creation, and here we hear reverberations of Moshe H.ayyim Efrayim’s commentary. According to Natan: In truth, given the renewal of the works of creation every day, even one who is a very great z. addiq, who has grappled and labored many years with divine worship, has still nevertheless not begun at all. For the blessed One makes new things in each moment. As it is written, “In His goodness, he is always every day renewing the works of creation.”46 No day resembles any other, for the blessed One innovates wondrous novelties in every moment and hour.47 43 Cf. Sternhartz, H.ayyei MoHaRaN, vol. 2, 12b. 44 LH, 118–19. 45 Lulu Miller, “The Eleventh Word,” Paris Review (October 5, 2020), https://www.theparisreview. org/blog/2020/10/05/the-eleventh-word/. 46 From the first blessing before the Shema, recited in the daily morning liturgy. 47 LH, 122–23. On the ever-changing nature of the cosmos, see H.ayyim Vital, ‘Eiz. H.ayyim, 1:5. 243 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 244 Sam S. B. Shonkoff The world is neither static object nor mechanistic “nature.” It is, rather, the fluidity of divine unfolding.48 Nothing is ever actually “old.” Things only appear that way through old lenses. Indeed, for Natan, the epitome of oldness is to “deny the renewal of the world,” to see it “as if, perish the thought, this material world is already worn and old.”49 The elixir is expanded attention, the brighteyed vision of new life. In fact, doctrines of creation aside, the world truly is always changing, and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik observes that young children are exceptionally attuned to this flux. Adults simply stop noticing. On a chemical level, babies’ brains do not yet produce the neurotransmitters that inhibit attention—so much so that it requires higher doses of anesthetics to sedate infants than adults.50 Of course, adults develop superior abilities to focus, but this comes at a price. Gopnik suggests that our concentrated attention functions like a “spotlight,” illuminating just enough world for the task at hand while casting darkness over everything else. A now classic study demonstrated that adults who are instructed to track a mildly complex sequence in a video will literally not notice a guy in a gorilla suit strutting across the screen.51 Such “inattentional blindness” is unimaginable to children. If adult consciousness is like a spotlight, Gopnik explains, then children’s attention is like a lantern, whereby “they seem to be vividly experiencing everything at once.”52 In this respect, “It’s plausible that babies are actually aware of much more, much more intensely, than we are.”53 Intriguingly, however, Gopnik proposes that certain kinds of activities and experiences, from exotic travel to Zen meditation, can grant glimpses into the lantern attention of child mind.54 Indeed, “Lantern consciousness—that vivid panoramic illumination of the everyday—is often one part of some kinds of religious or aesthetic experience.”55 48 On the distinction between “nature” (tev‘a) and “world” (‘olam) in Nah.man’s thought, see Shaul Magid, “Nature, Exile, and Disability in R. Nahman of Bratslav’s ‘The Tale of the Seven Beggars, ’ ” in his Piety and Rebellion: Essays in H.asidism (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 106–138. 49 LH, 218–19. 50 Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 119–20. 51 Daniel J. Simons and Chrisopther F. Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception 28, no. 9 (1999): 1059–74. Cf. Gopnik, Philosophical Baby, 112–3. 52 Gopnik, Philosophical Baby, 125. See also her related distinction between “exploring” and “exploiting” in her The Gardener and Carpenter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 30–5. 53 Gopnik, Philosophical Baby, 125. 54 Ibid., 126–32. 55 Ibid., 129. Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press C h i l d M i n d i n H. a s i d i c S p i r i t u a l i t y In a vastly different cultural context, early h.asidic sages also sensed that adults can access aspects of child mind. For Natan, this demands radical acts of letting go. One must emulate the eagle, whose youthfulness returns through shedding: “the more he ages, the more he renews his vitality and the more he begins living anew in each moment.”56 In human life, this involves a sort of forgetting. “To begin anew in every moment with a new practice,” Natan writes, “You must completely forget all the practice that you have performed until now and begin anew right now.”57 Put differently, “In every moment and in every hour, you must remind yourself of the blessed One and completely forget what happened in the past. Really begin anew, starting now, as much as you can.”58 Although the blind beggar proved to “remember” more than anyone else in the tower when he added that he remembers “nothing at all,” Natan insists that we “cannot actually conceive of this consciousness as ‘memory’ at all. It is higher than memory, the root of memory, subsumed in Infinity.”59 Remembering that which is prior to the past is itself a powerful forgetting, whereby one remembers what is eternally present, here and now. Such letting go must also take place in the realm of knowledge. Natan instructs his readers to make themselves like blank parchment, “actual processed skin,” ready to absorb the ink of new wisdom. Like the transformation of animal hide into Torah scrolls, “Peel away and dry out all your knowledge, your reasoning, and your tortuousness of heart that was in your consciousness, intellect, and awareness until now. Just prepare your awareness, your strength, and your entire body to receive.”60 This striking image echoes the mishnaic comparison of childhood learning to “ink written on new paper,”61 yet in this h.asidic context childhood is not an age but a way. For Natan, the supreme model of this intellectual emptying is Rebbe Nah.man, who told his h.asidim repeatedly over the years, “I know nothing.” In Natan’s interpretation, “The principle is that he never remained at one stage but rather moved fluidly from stage to stage, to ever higher and loftier levels. Even when he attained what he attained, etc., his awareness would not freeze there.”62 56 57 58 59 60 61 LH, 124. LH, 123. LH, 128. LH, 116. LH, 239. M Avot 4:20. Cf. Nah.man of Bratzlav, Liqutei MoHaRaN ( Jerusalem: Makhon Nah.alat Z. evi, 2015), part 1, 918–19 (§192). 62 LH, 119–20. On Nah.man’s “I know nothing,” see also Sternhartz, H.ayyei MoHaRaN, vol. 2, 9b; idem, Shivh.ei ha-RaN, 76 (§33); idem, Yemei MaHaRNaT, §§44, 51, 76, 83–84. See also Mark, Mist.iqah ve-Shiga’on, 306–8. 245 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 246 Sam S. B. Shonkoff This is how “one merits to begin divine service anew in every moment,” Natan emphasizes, “so it will not fall into the oldness of the Other Side—so your worship will not grow old for you, perish the thought.”63 Instead of the oldness of the demonic “Other Side,” which tempts us to see ourselves as finished and fixed, one ought to seek the “holy oldness” of the eagle, the blind beggar, and the long-faced Elder of elders, whose oldness is suffused with infancy. Of course, these kabbalistic allusions to the transcendent Wellspring of consciousness should remind us that Natan’s concept of childlikeness is far weirder than just beginner’s mind.64 While his sermon speaks a great deal about what it means for a person to stay fresh and awake in this world, he is also clearly gesturing beyond the “person” and “this world.” After all, let us recall that the blind beggar himself said, “I am not blind at all. It’s just that all the world’s time doesn’t amount to even a blink of an eye for me.” And while this character may correspond to the flesh-and-blood person Rebbe Nah.man, their inner lives pulse beyond mundane reality, according to Bratzlav H.asidism. In Natan’s words, the blind beggar “is the root of everything and higher than everything,” for he “is subsumed in [divine] Infinity, which is prior to everything, where the world doesn’t amount to even a blink of an eye.”65 From this supernal vantage point, child mind is intensely mystical. This would seem to take us far afield from Gopnik’s depiction of what it is like to be a baby. Indeed, she notes explicitly that the lantern consciousness of young children “seems unlike the kinds of mystical experience in which the external world seems to disappear altogether.”66 However, I wonder if the difference between mystical and infantile experiences is truly so clear. After all, Gopnik herself observes that babies lack a sense of “self,” even to the point that their memories are not experienced as “mine.”67 “Indeed,” she acknowledges, “one of the insights of the insight-meditation tradition is supposed to be precisely that 63 LH, 120. 64 I use the term “weird” here in line with a growing number of scholars and scientists who employ the term to denote phenomena that defy or destabilize our conventional explanatory models or epistemological frameworks. In the pithy formulation of Graham Harman, “Reality itself is weird because reality itself is incommensurable with any attempt to represent or measure it.” Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 51. See also Eileen A. Joy, “Weird Reading,” Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism 4 (2013): 29–30; David E. Presti, “An Expanded Conception of Mind,” in Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), ed. David Presti, 122–37; Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 1–17. 65 LH, 243, 211. See also Sippurei Ma‘asiyot, 372. 66 Gopnik, Philosophical Baby, 130. 67 Ibid., 133–63, 196–97. Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press C h i l d M i n d i n H. a s i d i c S p i r i t u a l i t y there is no ‘I.’ Whether or not this is true for adults, it does seem plausible that it is true for very young children.”68 Furthermore, in recent years, Gopnik has compared child mind to adult activities that are far wonkier than international travel and Zen meditation: “when adults dream or have psychedelic experiences, their brains are functioning more like children’s brains. It appears that the experience of babies and young children is more like dreaming or tripping than like our usual grown-up consciousness.” In short, “Being a baby may be both stranger and more intense than we think.”69 Of course, it is ultimately impossible for adults to know what it is like to be a baby—that experience is more ineffable than the most mystical or psychedelic experiences. However, theosophical symbolism aside, the phenomenological textures of Natan’s depiction of child mind, in all its nonlinear self-transcendence, are perhaps more true-to-life than they may seem. In any case, one thing that we can confidently say about babies and young children is that they are “uniquely dependent on adults.”70 This points us, in fact, to a final aspect of child mind in Natan’s thought, which is also perhaps the most obvious one of all in H.asidism: being like a child of the rebbe. Despite neo-h.asidic efforts to soften hierarchies between sages and their disciples, one can hardly overstate the gravity and grandeur of rebbes in h.asidic spirituality. Followers are indeed childlike in their presence, swaddled in the enormity of their master’s wisdom, power, and love. Natan recalls how, when he became Nah.man’s disciple, “He grasped my hand and drew me close in his great compassion, and he carried me like a nurse carries a baby.”71 Years later, after Nah.man had chastised him, Natan describes how Nah.man then “returned and drew me very close like a father delights in his son.”72 To characterize the 68 Ibid., 156. 69 Alison Gopnik, “For Babies, Is Life a Trip?,” Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2018, https://www. proquest.com/newspapers/review-mind-matter-babies-is-life-trip/docview/2072633469/ se-2?accountid=14496. See also Gopnik’s comments in the recorded panel discussion “Revealing the Mind: The Promise of Psychedelics,” World Science Festival, NYU Skirball Center, May 30, 2019, accessed October 31, 2022, https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/ videos/revealing-mind-promise-psychedelics/. 70 Gopnik, Philosophical Baby, 10. 71 Sternhartz, Yemei MaHaRNaT, 7. Cf. Numbers 11:12. On Rebbe Nah.man as a nursing mother, see Nah.man of Bratzlav, Liqutei MoHaRaN, 65–66 (§4:8). See also Arthur Green, Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2004), 155; Mendel Piekarz, H.asidut Breslov ( Jerusalem: Bialik, 1972), 77, 138f; Nathaniel Deutsch, “Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav: The Zaddik as Androgyne,” in God’s Voice from the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, ed. Shaul Magid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 193–215. 72 Sternhartz, Yemei MaHaRNaT, 10. 247 Copyrighted Material © 2023 Academic Studies Press 248 Sam S. B. Shonkoff z.addiq as simply a “teacher” or “guide” is misleading. Terms like “axis mundi” and “incarnation” come closer to capturing the rebbe’s sublimity, somewhere between personhood and divinity.73 But nothing is more evocative, perhaps, than the word “parent,” when perceived through infantile eyes. This was one aspect of child mind that Natan never gave up. He was the most likely successor when Nah.man died, but he remained insistent that he was no rebbe. Rather, he remained as devoted as ever to Nah.man and, moreover, textualized his presence for posterity. And yet, here is the rub: While the H.asid is the child of the z.addiq, as it were, the true “z.addiq of the generation” is the most infantile of all, constantly newborn and thus defying the very forces of mortality, even in death.74 For Natan, Rebbe Nah.man himself will not return, but his eternally natal soul will crown again with the birth of the Messiah, whose future is perpetually present, incubating in God’s supertemporal secret, “I have given birth to you today” (Ps. 2:7).75 73 See Arthur Green, “The Z.addiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 3 (1977): 327–47; Shaul Magid, Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 74 Cf. Fishbane’s personal formulation: “The call of God (through all expressions of reality) may everywhere break the veil of our daily stupor, and then natality overcomes mortality. This is an ecstatic transcendence of mortality in a (specific) fullness of time, without denying the finality of death and dying.” Sacred Attunement, xiii. 75 See LH, 154–155. Cf. Nah.man of Bratzlav, Liqutei MoHaRaN, part 2, 1256–57 (§61).