Book Chapters by Sam S . B . Shonkoff
Handbook on Religious Toleration in Comparative Perspective, 2026
In a volume on "religious toleration," my chapter on Hasidism seeks to both problematize the term... more In a volume on "religious toleration," my chapter on Hasidism seeks to both problematize the terms of this book and to shed light on the case of this modern mystical movement. Hasidism is hardly known for its openness to non-Hasidim. Indeed, some Hasidic communities today are among the most insular groups in Jewish history. And yet, upon closer examination, the story is more complex. When Hasidism first emerged in the late eighteenth century as a movement for (primarily male) Jews in Eastern Europe, there were fairly strong traditions of engagement with “the other”—non-Jews, as well as Jews who were deemed peripheral due to their gender, religiosity, or culture. However, such perspectives in early Hasidism must be understood largely in terms of mystical paradigms that do not affirm so much as spiritualize the presence of the other. Starting in the nineteenth century, as Hasidic communities assumed more defensive postures against perceived threats of secularism and assimilation, their reflections on otherness grew more negative on the whole and were more likely to reference social concerns rather than mystical processes. This paper will present sources that both exemplify and defy the above-mentioned trends.
Jewish Culture and Creativity: Essays in Honor of Professor Michael Fishbane on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, 2023
The normative texts of Jewish tradition tend to portray young children as not-yet-adults. There a... more The normative texts of Jewish tradition tend to portray young children as not-yet-adults. There are expressions of excitement for them to grow up and perform actions of Torah study, marriage, and righteous deeds, but one is hard-pressed to find classical sources that draw inspiration from young children themselves as they are. Early Hasidism broke from this trend in significant ways. In contrast to the scholarly ideals of eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jewish culture, some early Hasidic sages went so far as to suggest that one who is ignorant of the tradition and even illiterate may have an easier time accessing the joy and trembling of spiritual connection. Hasidic celebrations of the “simple person” (tamim) is a much discussed expression of this perspective. A rather overlooked image, though, is that of the child. This article explores expressions of “child mind” in early Hasidic spirituality. In truth, much like the contemporaneous romanticization of children in Romantic literature, the theological sources we will examine say more about adults than they do about actual children. “Child mind” proves to be a decidedly grownup affair. Thus, in this essay, child mind refers precisely to the textures of children’s (including babies’) inner experiences, as imagined by adults in their own personal quests for meaning. A common ideal in this vein is a sort of beginner’s mind, where everything is new. However, Hasidic ruminations expand far beyond this frame, opening up perspectives that both reflect and defy insights from the field of developmental psychology.
Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, 2023
A remarkable number of Jewish commentators today highlight the biblical phrase na'aseh ve-nishma,... more A remarkable number of Jewish commentators today highlight the biblical phrase na'aseh ve-nishma, literally "we shall do and we shall hear" (Exod. 24:7), to affirm that theological truth is only intelligible through the prism of bodily events: in "doing," we "hear" or understand divinity. These often cite the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 88a) as a prooftext. However, my paper demonstrates that this interpretation is in fact distinctively modern, reflecting intellectual and political shifts in Europe, especially "enlightened" critiques of metaphysics and heteronomy. This modernness does not imply that the interpretation is therefore some invasive species, corrupting a pristine landscape of indigenous Judaism. On the contrary, Jewish theology unfolds diasporically and hermeneutically—and here is the very heartbeat of a living tradition. The new gloss emerges in late-eighteenth-century Hasidic mysticism and flows thereafter into other tributaries of Jewish thought, from Buber, Heschel, and Levinas through Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Jay Michaelson, and Mara Benjamin. In tracing the hermeneutical afterlives of Exod 24:7, we unveil not only a striking mutation in modern Jewish exegesis but also a broader "embodied theological" turn in modern religiosity. This paper illuminates the intertextual and phenomenological textures of this transformation.
Michael Fishbane: Jewish Hermeneutical Theology, 2015
This essay is the introduction to the book _Michael Fishbane: Jewish Hermeneutical Theology_ (201... more This essay is the introduction to the book _Michael Fishbane: Jewish Hermeneutical Theology_ (2015), a volume in Brill's Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers series, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron Hughes. The "intellectual portrait" is a first attempt to integrate the many facets and phases of Fishbane's life and work.
_Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy_ (Brill, 2018)
A New Hasidism: Roots, 2019
This essay introduces readers to Martin Buber as a foundational figure for Neo-Hasidism. In addit... more This essay introduces readers to Martin Buber as a foundational figure for Neo-Hasidism. In addition to documenting his changing perspectives on Hasidism over time, the essay also examines Buber's personal shift toward more relational modes of thought, emphasizing especially the intellectual influences of his grandmother Adele Buber (née Weiser) and his wife, Paula Buber (née Winkler). This piece is designed to be stimulating for both specialists and non-specialists alike.
Readers are also encouraged to turn to Buber's essays featured in this chapter, which I have annotated with references to the original Hasidic sources.
Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man , 2014
Meditations on the Burning Man festival through the prisms of desert, dust, and destruction in Je... more Meditations on the Burning Man festival through the prisms of desert, dust, and destruction in Jewish sources.
Books by Sam S . B . Shonkoff
Brandeis University Press, 2020
Hasidism has attracted, repelled, and bewildered philosophers, historians, and theologians since ... more Hasidism has attracted, repelled, and bewildered philosophers, historians, and theologians since its inception in the eighteenth century. In Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community, and Life in the Modern World, Ariel Evan Mayse and Sam Berrin Shonkoff present students and scholars with a vibrant and polyphonic set of Hasidic confrontations with the modern world. In this collection, they show that the modern Hasid marks not only another example of a Jewish pietist, but someone who is committed to an ethos of seeking wisdom, joy, and intimacy with the divine.
While this volume focuses on Hasidism, it wrestles with a core set of questions that permeate modern Jewish thought and religious thought more generally: What is the relationship between God and the world? What is the relationship between God and the human being? But Hasidic thought is cast with mystical, psychological, and even magical accents, and offers radically different answers to core issues of modern concern. The editors draw selections from an array of genres including women’s supplications; sermons and homilies; personal diaries and memoirs; correspondence; stories; polemics; legal codes; and rabbinic responsa. These selections consciously move between everyday lived experience and the most ineffable mystical secrets, reflecting the multidimensional nature of this unusual religious and social movement. The editors include canonical texts from the first generation of Hasidic leaders up through present-day ultra-orthodox, as well as neo-Hasidic voices and, in so doing, demonstrate the unfolding of a rich and complex phenomenon that continues to evolve today.
Brill, 2018
Here is the preface with notes about the various essays.
Articles by Sam S . B . Shonkoff
Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 2023
Awarded the 2023 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Essay Prize
Martin Buber's anthologies of Hasidic... more Awarded the 2023 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Essay Prize
Martin Buber's anthologies of Hasidic tales remain some of his most widely read writings, but few have studied them intertextually vis-à-vis the original Hasidic sources. This article does so, focusing specifically on Buber's representations of gender in Hasidism. Reading Buber's tales hermeneutically for gender sheds light on Buber, Hasidism, and the dynamic confluence between them. Firstly, it helps us to identify key aspects of Buber's representation of Hasidic theology. Regardless of his intentions, when Buber remolded Hasidic sources to prioritize bodily concreteness over spiritual abstraction, meetings over meditations, and tales over treatises, he subverted theological-metaphysical constructions of gender in Hasidism. Secondly, reading the tales for gender illuminates key aspects of Buber's representation of Hasidic communities. Buber often softened and omitted sexist elements in the original sources. While this may reveal his egalitarian impulses at times, the article demonstrates that Buber's efforts to hide misogyny actually rendered women even less visible than they were in the original sources, as images of women dissolved into a sort of gender-blind, neutral (i.e. masculine) humanism. As a whole, Buber's textual alterations raise thorny questions regarding the ethics of neo-Hasidism or any other movements that gloss over the shadows of historical phenomena.
Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 2022
It has become commonplace among scholars to map Martin Buber's concepts of "I-It" and "I-Thou" on... more It has become commonplace among scholars to map Martin Buber's concepts of "I-It" and "I-Thou" onto Kant's phenomenon and noumenon, respectively. However, this has resulted in significant misconceptions about Buber's phenomenology of dialogue. In fact, his philosophy was decidedly post-Kantian in the dual sense of being both under the influence of Kant and in opposition to him, and attention to themes of embodiment (Leiblichkeit) in Buber's writings helps to disentangle these aspects. Through close philological readings, this paper demonstrates how Buber sought to circumvent the transcendental boundary between appearance and being, appropriated Kant's language of "intuition" to describe a sensory encounter with the presence of a thing in itself, and affirmed that while being is not apprehended in terms of space and time, it is nonetheless spatial and temporal. Ultimately, these investigations elucidate what I term Buber's dialogical monism, which in some ways anticipated insights of new materialism.
Oxford Bibliographies, 2022
A bibliographic resource to support scholars, students, and seekers in their studies of neo-Hasid... more A bibliographic resource to support scholars, students, and seekers in their studies of neo-Hasidism.
From the introduction:
“Neo-Hasidim” (sing. Neo-Hasid) are non-Hasidic Jews who draw upon Hasidism for purposes of spiritual or cultural renewal. Neo-Hasidism is thus rooted in a belief that the core of Hasidism—often identified with the movement’s earliest generations—is transferrable to other sociological contexts. Neo-Hasidim tend to be more secular and liberal-minded than Hasidim, but this is not necessarily the case. Note that even the most radical innovators within Hasidism itself, such as Nahman of Bratslav, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno, or Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, are not “neo-Hasidic” per se, since they operated within Hasidic communities. A border case, however, is women from Hasidic families who have been excluded from the central sites of Hasidic identity performance due to their gender and yet drawn deeply upon Hasidism in their own lives. When neo-Hasidism emerged in Central Europe at the dawn of the 20th century, it represented a striking cultural shift. From the Enlightenment through the 19th century, liberal Jews had generally cast Hasidism as backward, superstitious, and irrational. This was largely a strategic position: by differentiating themselves from “uncivilized,” “oriental” Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews), especially those ecstatic Hasidim, liberal Jews could demonstrate their own worthiness of citizenship and civil rights in modern nation-states. Around the turn of the century, though, a new generation of Jews rejected these bourgeois, assimilationist aspirations. On one hand, unmitigated discrimination against Jews and a rise of racial anti-Semitism seemed to suggest that liberal Jewish denigration of Ostjuden was unproductive, if not immoral. On the other hand, at the same time, a wave of neo-Romanticism swelled in the region, as more and more Europeans asserted that modernist rationalism, promises of progress, and industrialization and urbanization had only bred disenchantment and alienation. Many turned to folk cultures, mythologies, and mysticisms as keys to a renewed vitality. From this perspective, Hasidism took on a new aura. The first wave of what came to be called neo-Hasidism began as a literary phenomenon. Modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers such as Y. L. Peretz (b. 1852–d. 1915), Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (b. 1865– d. 1921), and Samuel Abba Horodezky (b. 1871– d. 1957) wrote glowingly about Hasidism from decidedly non-Hasidic—or, in some cases, ex-Hasidic—vantage points. Around the same time, Hillel Zeitlin (b. 1871– d. 1942) and Martin Buber (b. 1878– d. 1965) celebrated Hasidism as a resource for Jewish religious renewal. Decades later, a second wave of neo-Hasidism took shape among spiritual seekers in the North American Jewish counterculture of the 1960s. Sparked initially by immigrants who had fled the Shoah (Holocaust)—most notably Abraham Joshua Heschel (b. 1907– d. 1972), Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (b. 1924– d. 2014), and Shlomo Carlebach (b. 1925– d. 1994)—the neo-Hasidic ethos gained steam through activities of US-born seekers and scholars, especially through the Jewish Renewal movement. Additional, and sometimes surprising, offshoots of neo-Hasidism continue to spread through today.
Religions, 2022
From the special issue in honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr's 80th birthday, edited by Claudia Welz, Chr... more From the special issue in honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr's 80th birthday, edited by Claudia Welz, Christian Wiese, and Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen.
“Post-traditional” Jewishness—a distinctively modern condition wherein past sources of theological authority and religious normativity are no longer self-evident—has been one of the most abiding interests in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s writings for more than four decades. The present article traces the contours of this concern over time. In a number of publications between 1978 and 1987, Mendes-Flohr highlights “secular religiosity” as a manifestation of post-traditional Jewishness, exemplified by figures such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. These early writings intimate the possibility of a critical and yet nonetheless integrated Jewish religious subject, grounded hermeneutically in Jewish sources and sociologically in the Jewish community of destiny (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). Starting in the late 1980s, however, Mendes-Flohr’s representations of post-traditional Jewishness begin to emphasize greater degrees of complexity and, indeed, fragmentation. These later writings gesture less to visions of secular religiosity than toward postures of “undogmatic, pluralistic, and open” self-reflectivity before the ever-changing faces of reality. Throughout this rich trajectory in Mendes-Flohr’s thought, though, we see that he returns continually—and ever more trenchantly—to dialogical life as a grounding principle.
Journal of Religion, 2021
The annual Eranos conference in Ascona, Switzerland, contributed immensely to discourse about rel... more The annual Eranos conference in Ascona, Switzerland, contributed immensely to discourse about religion and spirituality from its inception in 1933. These gatherings, which revolved largely around the psychologist Carl Jung, investigated religious consciousness by way of spiritual “symbols” or “archetypes.” Such images were generally treated as timeless, autonomous phenomena that penetrate beyond historical particularities and social forms into the transcendent depths of the mystical Self. Discourse at Eranos thus portrayed the essence of religion as decontextualized and deethicized. The present article demonstrates that the German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber was already sensitive to the sociopolitical dangers of this approach when he lectured at Eranos in 1934. The essay that emerged out of those lectures, “Sinnbildliche und sakramentale Existenz im Judentum (Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism),” is widely read as a classic of Buber’s writings on Hasidism. And yet, the historical details surrounding Buber’s Eranos lectures, especially as evidenced in the unpublished letters between him and the conference organizer, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, as well as the stenographer’s typescript of Buber’s live orations, shed remarkable new light on the well-known essay. “Sinnbildliche und sakramentale Existenz” was, in fact, composed largely as a polemic against Jung and his followers at Eranos, a number of whom were aligned with National Socialism and other fascist movements. In an act of scholarly resistance, Buber challenged widespread perspectives at Eranos regarding symbolism, Gnosticism, and the nature of religion. In so doing, he anticipated later critiques of Eranos that took shape in the 1990s.
Religions (special issue edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr), 2018
It is well known that Martin Buber abandoned Jewish law as a binding code. Scholars have identifi... more It is well known that Martin Buber abandoned Jewish law as a binding code. Scholars have identified him accurately as a religious anarchist, and his perspective is best characterized as metanomian—that is, one that locates the essence of religiosity outside of any fixed system, without necessarily opposing that system as a matter of principle. And yet, such general characterizations offer only a vague picture of Buber's stance. This paper demonstrates that it is especially illustrative for us to turn to Buber's Hasidic tales. First of all, precisely because Buber's concept of practice was irreducible to any static system or code, the genre of narrative conveys far more than any abstract formulation can. Moreover, inasmuch as Buber's Hasidic tales were his own hermeneutical refractions of earlier sources, which were in themselves teeming with images of practice, our intertextual investigations reveal at once narrative representations of religious life and Buber's personal interpretations of those narratives. What emerges from this study, then, is a textured and vivid vision of religious practice, which was not merely a peripheral concern but a life-encompassing core of Buber's thought.
Journal of Kyoto Association of Jewish Thought 7.2 (2019): 365-381, 2019
Translated into Japanese by Rui Matsuba.
For a related article in English, see my “Metanomianis... more Translated into Japanese by Rui Matsuba.
For a related article in English, see my “Metanomianism and Religious Praxis in Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales,” _Religions_ 9.12 (2018).
Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception article on the modern Jewish reception of Jeremiah (p... more Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception article on the modern Jewish reception of Jeremiah (prophet and book). I show how themes of exile/homeland, lamentation, and social justice are especially salient in the modern Jewish historical contexts of emancipation, Zionism, and the Shoah.
The Journal of Religion (Vol. 93, No. 4), Oct 2013
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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Book Chapters by Sam S . B . Shonkoff
Readers are also encouraged to turn to Buber's essays featured in this chapter, which I have annotated with references to the original Hasidic sources.
Books by Sam S . B . Shonkoff
While this volume focuses on Hasidism, it wrestles with a core set of questions that permeate modern Jewish thought and religious thought more generally: What is the relationship between God and the world? What is the relationship between God and the human being? But Hasidic thought is cast with mystical, psychological, and even magical accents, and offers radically different answers to core issues of modern concern. The editors draw selections from an array of genres including women’s supplications; sermons and homilies; personal diaries and memoirs; correspondence; stories; polemics; legal codes; and rabbinic responsa. These selections consciously move between everyday lived experience and the most ineffable mystical secrets, reflecting the multidimensional nature of this unusual religious and social movement. The editors include canonical texts from the first generation of Hasidic leaders up through present-day ultra-orthodox, as well as neo-Hasidic voices and, in so doing, demonstrate the unfolding of a rich and complex phenomenon that continues to evolve today.
Articles by Sam S . B . Shonkoff
Martin Buber's anthologies of Hasidic tales remain some of his most widely read writings, but few have studied them intertextually vis-à-vis the original Hasidic sources. This article does so, focusing specifically on Buber's representations of gender in Hasidism. Reading Buber's tales hermeneutically for gender sheds light on Buber, Hasidism, and the dynamic confluence between them. Firstly, it helps us to identify key aspects of Buber's representation of Hasidic theology. Regardless of his intentions, when Buber remolded Hasidic sources to prioritize bodily concreteness over spiritual abstraction, meetings over meditations, and tales over treatises, he subverted theological-metaphysical constructions of gender in Hasidism. Secondly, reading the tales for gender illuminates key aspects of Buber's representation of Hasidic communities. Buber often softened and omitted sexist elements in the original sources. While this may reveal his egalitarian impulses at times, the article demonstrates that Buber's efforts to hide misogyny actually rendered women even less visible than they were in the original sources, as images of women dissolved into a sort of gender-blind, neutral (i.e. masculine) humanism. As a whole, Buber's textual alterations raise thorny questions regarding the ethics of neo-Hasidism or any other movements that gloss over the shadows of historical phenomena.
From the introduction:
“Neo-Hasidim” (sing. Neo-Hasid) are non-Hasidic Jews who draw upon Hasidism for purposes of spiritual or cultural renewal. Neo-Hasidism is thus rooted in a belief that the core of Hasidism—often identified with the movement’s earliest generations—is transferrable to other sociological contexts. Neo-Hasidim tend to be more secular and liberal-minded than Hasidim, but this is not necessarily the case. Note that even the most radical innovators within Hasidism itself, such as Nahman of Bratslav, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno, or Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, are not “neo-Hasidic” per se, since they operated within Hasidic communities. A border case, however, is women from Hasidic families who have been excluded from the central sites of Hasidic identity performance due to their gender and yet drawn deeply upon Hasidism in their own lives. When neo-Hasidism emerged in Central Europe at the dawn of the 20th century, it represented a striking cultural shift. From the Enlightenment through the 19th century, liberal Jews had generally cast Hasidism as backward, superstitious, and irrational. This was largely a strategic position: by differentiating themselves from “uncivilized,” “oriental” Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews), especially those ecstatic Hasidim, liberal Jews could demonstrate their own worthiness of citizenship and civil rights in modern nation-states. Around the turn of the century, though, a new generation of Jews rejected these bourgeois, assimilationist aspirations. On one hand, unmitigated discrimination against Jews and a rise of racial anti-Semitism seemed to suggest that liberal Jewish denigration of Ostjuden was unproductive, if not immoral. On the other hand, at the same time, a wave of neo-Romanticism swelled in the region, as more and more Europeans asserted that modernist rationalism, promises of progress, and industrialization and urbanization had only bred disenchantment and alienation. Many turned to folk cultures, mythologies, and mysticisms as keys to a renewed vitality. From this perspective, Hasidism took on a new aura. The first wave of what came to be called neo-Hasidism began as a literary phenomenon. Modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers such as Y. L. Peretz (b. 1852–d. 1915), Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (b. 1865– d. 1921), and Samuel Abba Horodezky (b. 1871– d. 1957) wrote glowingly about Hasidism from decidedly non-Hasidic—or, in some cases, ex-Hasidic—vantage points. Around the same time, Hillel Zeitlin (b. 1871– d. 1942) and Martin Buber (b. 1878– d. 1965) celebrated Hasidism as a resource for Jewish religious renewal. Decades later, a second wave of neo-Hasidism took shape among spiritual seekers in the North American Jewish counterculture of the 1960s. Sparked initially by immigrants who had fled the Shoah (Holocaust)—most notably Abraham Joshua Heschel (b. 1907– d. 1972), Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (b. 1924– d. 2014), and Shlomo Carlebach (b. 1925– d. 1994)—the neo-Hasidic ethos gained steam through activities of US-born seekers and scholars, especially through the Jewish Renewal movement. Additional, and sometimes surprising, offshoots of neo-Hasidism continue to spread through today.
“Post-traditional” Jewishness—a distinctively modern condition wherein past sources of theological authority and religious normativity are no longer self-evident—has been one of the most abiding interests in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s writings for more than four decades. The present article traces the contours of this concern over time. In a number of publications between 1978 and 1987, Mendes-Flohr highlights “secular religiosity” as a manifestation of post-traditional Jewishness, exemplified by figures such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. These early writings intimate the possibility of a critical and yet nonetheless integrated Jewish religious subject, grounded hermeneutically in Jewish sources and sociologically in the Jewish community of destiny (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). Starting in the late 1980s, however, Mendes-Flohr’s representations of post-traditional Jewishness begin to emphasize greater degrees of complexity and, indeed, fragmentation. These later writings gesture less to visions of secular religiosity than toward postures of “undogmatic, pluralistic, and open” self-reflectivity before the ever-changing faces of reality. Throughout this rich trajectory in Mendes-Flohr’s thought, though, we see that he returns continually—and ever more trenchantly—to dialogical life as a grounding principle.
For a related article in English, see my “Metanomianism and Religious Praxis in Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales,” _Religions_ 9.12 (2018).