Ahidden light is the interesting experiment of an insider who stands outside a world he left but never abandoned. The work is neither critical nor apologetic, nor is it polemical. It is the loving, creative rendition of a devotee who has tried in his long career to separate Hasidism’s radical theology from its rigid and conventional sociological framework. For the Jewish Renewal reader, it offers a window into the Hasidic world that inspired Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s revision of Jewish spirituality. To the comparativist, it brings to life a Hasidic world of story and teaching that utilizes the nomenclature of global religiosity and the New Age.
To understand this book, one must first understand what was perhaps the first great scholarly debate in twentieth-century Jewish mysticism. This debate was between Gershom Scholem and his one-time mentor Martin Buber on the nature of Hasidism, a type of Judaism that is practiced in...
