The Great Courses - Jewish Mysticism - Kalman P. Bland, Ph.D.

Written by Kalman P. Bland, Ph.D.
Read by Kalman P. Bland, Ph.D.
Format: MP3

Length: 12hr

Kalman P. Bland, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Judaic Studies
Duke University

Kalman P. Bland was born in Chicago, IL in 1942. He received a Bachelor’s Degree
in Philosophy from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s Degree from the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America in New York City in 1964. He was awarded a
Master of Hebrew Letters Degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1967,
and the following year was ordained a Rabbi. Continuing his concentration in the
History of Jewish Philosophy and Mysticism, Dr. Bland attended Brandeis
University where he earned a Doctoral Degree in Medieval Jewish-Islamic Philosophy in 1971.

His experiences include teaching courses in Jewish Theology at the Jewish
Theological Seminary, and a course in Medieval Jewish Philosophy at the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. He has taught for two years at
Indiana University, as well as The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Since 1977, he has been a faculty member at Duke University where he served as
Chairman of the Department of Religion for six years. Currently, he is the Director
of Duke’s Center for Judaic Studies. He also regularly teaches in the Masters of
Arts Program in Liberal Studies. In 1986, he was honored with a Distinguished
Undergraduate Teaching Award.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

These lectures begin by offering an historians answers to two rather
straightforward questions: What is Jewish about Jewish Mysticism (Kabbalah)?
What is mystical about Jewish Mysticism? The lectures end with an historians
attempt to understand our contemporary fascination with such arcane subjects.
Along the way, the major trends in Late Antique, medieval, early modern, and
modern Jewish mysticisms are introduced. Their characteristic beliefs and
meditational techniques are described. The audience may reasonably expect to
come away from these lectures having learned something useful about the academic
study of religion, the complexity of Judaism’s creative impulses, and the astonishing
resources of human imagination as it struggles to de-habituate the everyday in order
to discover infinities in grains of sand. Honoring the liberal injunction to let nothing
human be alien to us, these lectures are designed to demystify the Kabbalah. They
do not seek to judge whether the Kabbalah is morally good or bad, healthy-minded
or pathological, philosophically true or empirically false, but to discover what made
the Kabbalah possible or attractive to its adherents and implausible or repellent to its
opponents. Being an optimist, the lecturer assumes that, just as we are not obliged
to become triangles in order to grasp the Pythagorean Theorem, we need not be
Jewish Kabbalists in order to fathom Jewish Mysticism.

A mere handful of lectures cannot do justice to the two-thousand years of
Jewish history during which a plethora of mystical traditions evolved. They cannot
chart the many striking parallels and the equally striking dissimilarities between the
Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Sufism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. But they can
make visible the otherwise hidden processes by which medieval Jewish mystics-like
their counterparts, the medieval Jewish philosophers and theologians-transformed
the heritage of biblical and rabbinic Judaism. With ingenious legerdemain, they
aligned it with ancient mythic consciousness and newfangled metaphysical doctrines
that stressed the conflict between outer appearances and inner realities. The lectures
can suggest something of the competition between the philosophic and mystical
traditions and explain why mysticism succeeded where philosophy failed. The
lectures can also catch glimpses of Jewish history through the lens of the mystics,
just as they can identify some of the mystical factors shaping Jewish communal life
and ritual practice. Perhaps most importantly of all, the lectures can provide
members of the audience with sufficient historical background, technical
terminology, and clarification of fundamental concepts to allow them to confront
critically the primary sources of Jewish Mysticism as they become more readily
available every day. Being an optimist, the lecturer hopes so.