Elliot R. Wolfson (*1956 - )
Today's thoughts of the day come from one of the greatest scholars of our times: Elliot R. Wolfson. He is one of the leading scholars in the field of kabbalah, mysticism and the pheno- menology of mystical experience. He is professor at the New York University. He has written several admirably deep and thoughtful books and essays in this field, but he is also a philosopher, a painter and a poet. His publications have won several prestigious awards for Excellence in Scholarship. Today I have chosen a few lines from the postface of his impressive last book called "Open secret" (Columbia UP 2009). Here Wolfson writes about the paradoxical figure of the Messiah, who is always to come but never ever arrives:
"The pledge about the messianic future is, invariably, a put on, the putting off of what is forthcoming. At the most extreme, one might be tempted to think of the eschatological drama as a cover-up, a dogmatic cloak in which to envelop the truth that there is no Messiah for whom we must wait, the cloak that lays bare the final divestiture of the cloak, the pretense of describing the end as the full disclosure of the essence without any garment, a seeing of the divine light as it is manifest in the garb of the material world, which (dis)appears, finally to reveal its concealment. The concluding exposé at the fringe of time is the hierophany of this occlusion."
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(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)
