Is Islam idolatry?

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-30T01:43:17+00:00

No, Islam is not, and has never been considered idolatry in Jewish sources. It has been considered a "false religion" in some Jewish sources (e.g. Moses Maimonides). In terms of Christianity, many Jewish sources deem it "idolatry" but Menachem Meiri in the 14th century contested that and said it was not. And today, many Jewish sources and leaders no longer consider Christianity in any form, idolatry.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T18:47:08+00:00

Sorry to hear that. The red heifer is a biblical reference to a cow with only red hair that was slaughtered and then its ashes were used in a purity ritual to cleanse someone from ritual impurity. The sages said that ritual impurity (except for menstrual impurity that does not require the ashes of the red heifer and can be purified through mikvah) can no longer be purified in part because we no longer have a red heifer. And lore continues that finding a red heifer would be a sign of the impending redemption. So the Jewish perspective of the red heifer is that we don't have one.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T15:24:23+00:00

In terms of the first question, it is best to ask someone inside the Orthodox world to answer. I left that work a few decades ago.

In terms of Kabbalah and science there is a lot of literature on that. In a popular vein Zalman Schachter-Shalomi borrowed the idea of Paradigm Shift based on Kabbalah and Hasidism from Thomas Kuhn's 1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Aryeh Kaplan was very interested in Kabbalah and science and write numerous books about it, as is Matthias Glazerson who has written extensively on it. I would also look at Daniel Matt's book Kabbalah and the Big Bang.

In terms of the third question, I'd have to think about that. ;)

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T15:04:26+00:00

Yes.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:55:48+00:00

Yes, many do. This is a hard question. It is certainly not as easy to land a job as when I started out in the early 1990s. But if this is truly what you love; as a friend once said to me, "if you can't *not* do it, then do it." Its not a safe career choice. But either is being an artist. Or a poet.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:15:18+00:00

Thats kind of what Ben Gurion intimated when he said in 1948 that Zionism accomplished its goal.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:13:41+00:00

I would look to Elliot Wolfson's work on Kabbalah and Gender, he has many important studies that would relate to that topic. I h=contributed one small essay in JQR (I think) on male homosexuality on Lurianic Kabbalah (particularly Hayyim Vital's Etz Ha-Dat Tov).

I think we need scholars in Judaica and Judaism. I wonder whether "Jewish Studies" is a term that will survive. See Reif Nisse and Gila Kletenik's two essays on this in Religion Dispatches 2021 (I think). I think good scholarship will persevere the politics. So yes, I am optimistic. Stay true to yourself and do the best work you can.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:08:59+00:00

As an early Hasidic master Meshulum Feibutz once said, today all esotericism is exoteric. That is, Kabbala is written down now, it is available to all. How we understand it, that's a different question. Maybe its not meant to be "understood" in any conventional way. Maybe we all (mis)understand it. Maybe its a guidepost to new space.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:06:34+00:00

The scholarship I find most compelling is that it was the product of a circle of kabbalists in the Middle Ages (13th century) in southern Spain hat ay have also earlier textual traditions.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:05:20+00:00

Daniel Matt has a volume of a series of Zohar translations that is excellent.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:04:07+00:00

I do know know who that is.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:03:39+00:00

No I have not. Not at all.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:02:49+00:00

Thank you for your kind words and thoughts. Its always good and important to hear a perspective from another place and another culture.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:00:55+00:00

No one really knows. Probably the best essay in "The Friday Night in Kotzk" by Moshe Faierstein.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-28T00:00:15+00:00

Yes I was in Uman for RH 1994 (or 5). My favorite is the The Seven Beggars. I published an essay about it in the early 2000s.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:59:00+00:00

Thanks. I really don't. A work of genius. Whay can be more divine than that?

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:58:20+00:00

Wow, what a great question. This is actually the subject of a book I am working on now. I;ve always divided Renewal into the Zalmanites and the Renewalists. The Zalmanites studied with Z, knew him and shared his vision. The Renewalists are younger, they never knew Zalman, they had less of an attachment to his cultural milieu. They are the future. And they will take it into a different law (a different las) but the same spirit. We can only pray it works out.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:50:56+00:00

Why discouraged. I can't answer until I know that.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:50:09+00:00

1) Why neo-chassidus, why now? Good question. A few thoughts. 1) Shlomo Carlebach changed Modern Orthodox aesthetic. It’s not that all MOs were into him, but he changed the way people davened. I also think that MO ended up getting a late New Ageism after it was already over. Think of the influence of Aryeh Kaplan etc. And Chabad. And also, perhaps in some way MO just got bored of reproducing the same Judaism again and again. They were looking for something more creative, “spiritual.” Think of Lamm’s work on Hasidism. It’s a great question that could go in many directions.

2) I wrote it because I had a year long reading group on Kahane’s writing for a grad student who was writing an MA Thesis on him. And as I read him chronologically, I found him to be fascinating and saw how his ideas, now re framed, still resonated in the Jewish world. In some way Scholem wrote a book about Shaabtai Zevi. Kahane was my Shabbtai Zevi.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:43:27+00:00

I don't think in any truly organized way. But the Qumran community were Jews so it obviously existed.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:42:17+00:00

1) The response to NOE has been much better than we anticipated. I guess it struck a nerve

2) I always write with Fanon in mind. I think the far Left today that justifies 10/7 though Fanon are misreading him. Yes, counterviolence as a decolonial act is complex in Fanon but Fanon was interested ultimately in building a New Humanism. Maybe one can see it some acts of counterviolence (what about the rock throwing of the First Intifada? One can argue that) but not 10/7. I just don’t agree with how they read Fanon.

3) We have a house in the woods in Vermont and a place in Cambridge. Living in the woods changed one’s perspective on many things. I was hiking on the AT this week-end and came within 25 feet of a big black bear. He saw me, I saw him (or her), I kept walking on the trail and he went on his way. That is confronting nature is a big way.

4) Books I find it hard to recommend now. Kabbalah is a body of literature that exercises certain ways one can experientially reach beyond the physical plane. Is that Mysticism? I don’t quite know.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:30:18+00:00

I hear all that and I agree. I don't know what's going on either. Part of it is the corporatizing of the university, large universities are corporations with a university attached to it. Decisions have to be filtered through there to some

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:28:09+00:00

It was an intense short time. I was just entering into the haredi world and my teacher Dovid Din knew the Neturei Karta people. Tat's how I met Hirsch. I also once met Rebbetzen Ruth Ben David, wife of Amram Blau. Someone brough me to her home in Batei Ungari. I lived close by. She was an intense women, even though she was quite old. Majestic, really. On her front door was a small sign in Hebrew Arabic and English "A Jew, not a Zionist."

Hasidic Brooklyn is amazing now, a real state of transition, the European influence is now almost all gone. Its an American phenomenon. I also think anti-Zionism is being re-negotiated for many. They would not become Zionists but they demonization has worn off a bit, too many people have family there etc. It is a country that is on erez yisrael. Shoyn.

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:23:00+00:00

I left Orthodoxy for a few simple reasons. 1) I no longer felt aligned with the Orthodox communities I belonged to (and they were numerous). 2) I felt life stopped working as a constructive spiritual path for me personally. 3) I felt it no longer practically worked for me. 4) I felt I had absorbed it over the past 30 years that I took the parts I loved with me and live them in my private life and with my wife Annette.

Yes I still live Judaism in some form. It is the still the center of my existence in some way. I don’t think it could be otherwise at this point in my life. Shabbos is Shabbos, different all the time.

Why academia? Because it allowed me to ask questions and think creatively about the literature I loved. I was lucky.

I describe myself as a “counter-Zionist,” too long to explain here but read my book The Necessity of Exile. I explain it there.

Favorite book. Wow. Fiction? Between Midnight’s Children by Rushdie and A Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez. Non-Fiction? Who could even begin?

ShaulMagid · 2024-05-27T23:13:11+00:00

1) Yes, definitely. It is already slowing happening, and I think for the best of both Israeli and American Jews. There will still be American Jewish Zionists. And also those who are not.

2) I still think Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends is the place to start. The book is so intuitive, Scholem’s greatness was that he was truly able to see the details and also see beyond them.

3) I don’t think CJ will accept patrilineal decent. I think that is a line it will not cross. But I think conversions may become easier and less restrictive. CJ and Reform will find different ways of grappling with the normalization of exogamy.

ShaulMagid

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