Kabbalah and Postmodernism: A Dialogue (Peter Lang, 2009). In this volume Dr. Drob examines the convergence between Jewish mystical ideas and the thought of Jacques Derrida, the founder of “deconstruction,” and puts this convergence in the service of a theology that not only survives the challenges of atheism, cultural relativism, and anti-foundationalism, but welcomes and includes these ideas.
Kabbalah and Postmodernism challenges certain long-held philosophical and theological beliefs, including the assumptions that the insights of mystical experience are unavailable to human reason and inexpressible in linguistic terms, that the God of traditional theology either does or does not exist, that “systematic theology” must provide a univocal account of God, man, and the world, that “truth” is “absolute” and not continually subject to radical revision, and that the truth of propositions in philosophy and theology excludes the truth of their opposites and contradictions. Readers of Kabbalah and Postmodernism will be exposed to a comprehensive mode of theological thought that incorporates the very doubts that would otherwise lead one to challenge the possibility of theology and religion, and which both preserves the riches of the Jewish tradition and extends beyond Judaism to a non-dogmatic universal philosophy and ethic.
Kabbalah and Postmodernism provides a philosophical interpretation of such Kabbalistic symbols as Ein-sof (the infinite absolute), Tzimtzum (divine contraction) and Shevirat ha-Kelim (the Breaking of the Vessels). Drawing upon the symbols of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the doctrines of Chabad Hasidism, and the thought of Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Hegel, the author explores the ideas that divinity embodies infinite being, thought and discourse, that “God” (Ein-sof) is the “union of all opposites,” that “reality” is an infinitely interpretable text, and that there is a “coincidence of opposites” with respect to essential theological, philosophical and psychological ideas. Dr. Drob argues that humanity must move from its predilection for unilinear thought to bilinear and multi-linear thinking, and that all forms of thought and being, including all systems of philosophy, theology and psychology are inherently incomplete, subject to “shattering” (Shevirat Hakelim) and revision/emendation (Tikkun). Hardcover, 338 pp.