It's Good to See the King: Visual Kabbalah and the Diagramming of the Divine
Main Line Reform Temple
410 Montgomery Avenue
Wynnewood, PA 19096
Most students of kabbalistic literature find themselves “visualizing” its cosmogonic and cosmological teachings. The iconic “Tree of Life” is certainly the best known kabbalistic symbol, and is often the first thing conveyed to those being exposed to this lore. What few realize is that complex graphical scrolls have been a genre of kabbalistic literature in their own right since the Renaissance, and that from the late seventeenth century such scrolls became an indispensable tool to Lurianic kabbalists. In his presentation, Dr. Chajes will introduce this little known genre and explain the origins and functions of these amazing kabbalistic artifacts.
Featuring
J. H. (Yossi) Chajes
University of Haifa
J. H. (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is Sir Isaac Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa. Chajes’s research focuses on the intersection of Kabbalah, magic, and science in Jewish cultural history. Chajes’s first book, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (2003) was listed by the Wall Street Journal as among the top five books ever written on spirit possession, alongside Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun. Chajes’s foundational book, The Kabbalistic Tree, was published in November 2022 by Penn State University Press and has been lauded as a “monumental achievement that will be valuable to scholars and general readers interested in Judaism, religion, and art history.” In November 2023, The Kabbalistic Tree was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize of the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought. It is also a 2024 National Jewish Book Award finalist.