Description
Piety and Rebellion examines the span of the Hasidic textual tradition from its earliest phases to the 20th century. The essays collected in this volume focus on the tension between Hasidic fidelity to tradition and its rebellious attempt to push the devotional life beyond the borders of conventional religious practice. Many of the essays exhibit a comparative perspective deployed to better articulate the innovative spirit, and traditional challenges, Hasidism presents to the traditional Jewish world. Piety and Rebellion is an attempt to present Hasidism as one case whereby maximalist religion can yield a rebellious challenge to conventional conceptions of religious thought and practice.
Reviews
“Piety and Rebellion further establishes Shaul Magid’s deserved reputation as one of the leading scholars working today on Hasidism and modern Judaism more broadly. The learned and creative essays collected here reflect the prolific span of Magid’s career and constitute a distinguished contribution to the critical interpretation of hasidic texts and ideas. New to this volume, Magid opens with a vivid autobiographical account of his own spiritual and scholarly journey into Hasidism and Neo-hasidism, told with verve as a voyage of intellectual excitement and discovery.”
“Some scholars move on from the textual studies that distinguished their early work and flower as public intellectuals and communal sages, equipped to survey and interpret the dilemmas of the present. This collection of essays serves as the scholarly and intellectual diary of the evolution of Shaul Magid, tempered in the study of Kabbalah and Hasidism, now a scholarly and communal leader. Anyone who wants to understand the troubled and ambivalent times in which we live would do well to review these studies, which combine scholarly rigor and the eros of spiritual quest.”
“Piety and Rebellion is a superb collection of ten essays on Hasidism by Shaul Magid, one of the more daring and innovative interpreters of Jewish thought and cultural studies. The two parts of the book, early and later Hasidism, demonstrate the impressive range of the author’s command of primary and secondary material. Magid’s studies enrich our understanding of both the historical and the phenomenological contours of the pietism that emerged in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its repercussions in forms of American Jewish fundamentalism that evolved in the twentieth century. Each of the essays is well documented, providing a myriad of avenues of research for future generations. In addition to the ten chapters, the author has provided a moving introduction in which he charts his way to neo-Hasidism, framed particularly in terms of the struggle with the matter of alterity, determining one’s sense of identity in relation to the other and envisioning the possibility of living otherwise. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the struggle with alterity informs many of the essays included in this volume. The charting of Magid’s personal odyssey will surely be of great interest to potential readers and only adds luster to a very fine anthology of critical essays that shed light on the pious nature of rebellion and the rebellious nature of piety.”
