JDS 391LEC—Gender, Body, Kabbalah

In this course, we will explore Jewish Mysticism from its earliest sources in ancient Jewish texts to its contemporary use in New Age Religion. While stories and ideas are important to kabbalah, experience and feeling are its very essence. Mystics seek out deep, transformative, and even potentially destructive feeling with everything they have, beginning with their own, gendered bodies, and the strong emotions most familiar to them through love and sexuality. Often, people cultivate these emotions by means of stories and ritual practices that change or queer gender categories and sexual norms. This class will trace the development of mystical experience and feeling in Jewish mystical narratives and practices over time and space. By the end of the course students will be familiar with the core texts in kabbalah, they will have a good grasp of its cosmological models, and the role of gender, sexuality, and the body in cultivating experience and affect to act on these models.