Gershom Scholem famously read the myth as Judaism's answer to the 1492 expulsion from Spain, a reading later scholars contest.
Imported citation, not independently checked: G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941)
religion · Shared topic · Revision 0
Who Was Isaac Luria?
Who Was Isaac Luria?
The current answer
A mystic in Safed who taught for two years, wrote almost nothing, and left Judaism its grandest myth: a God who withdraws, a creation that shatters, a world waiting for repair.
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In Egypt he immersed himself in the Zohar; the famous image of years of solitary meditation on a Nile island comes mostly from later hagiography and should be held loosely.
Imported citation, not independently checked: Shivchei ha-Ari, early seventeenth-century hagiography
Luria left almost no writings: a few Aramaic Sabbath hymns still sung today, and a commentary on a short Zoharic text attributed to his Egyptian years.
Imported citation, not independently checked: L. Fine, Physician of the Soul (2003); Chaim Vital, Etz Chaim
Lawrence Fine shifts the frame again, reading Lurianic Kabbalah less as trauma-response than as the ritual life of a real community of pietists in Safed (Fine, 2003).
Imported citation, not independently checked: L. Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (2003)
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