This book presents Maimonides against the religious background that informed his many innovative and influential choices. The book not only analyses the thought of the great religious thinker but contextualizes it in terms of the ‘proto-kabbalistic’ Judaism that preceded him. The book shows how the Judaism that Maimonides knew had come to conceptualize the world as an enchanted universe,...
This chapter describes the concepts of kavod , shekhinah , and created light. The term kavod occurs about a dozen times in the Torah in some sense or other of perceptible divine presence. Rabbinic literature tends to prefer the term shekhinah for what is apparently the same phenomenon. Heikhalot literature seems to place greater emphasis on kavod than on shekhinah , while later kabbalah does...