National Jewish Book
Awards Finalist
for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2018.


Hasidism, a movement of religious awakening and social reform,
originated in the mid-eighteenth century. After two and a half centuries of
crisis, upheaval, and renewal, it remains a vibrant way of life and a
compelling aspect of Jewish experience. This book explores the profound
intellectual and religious issues that the hasidic masters raised in their
Torah commentary, and brings to the fore the living qualities of their sermons
(derashot).



Ora Wiskind-Elper addresses a spectrum of topics: creation,
revelation, and redemption; hermeneutics, epistemology, psychology,
Romanticism, poetry and poetics, art history, Hebrew fiction, cultural history,
and tropes of Jewish suffering and hope. Fully engaged in the texts and their
spirituality, she brings them to bear on postmodernist challenges to
traditional spiritual and religious sensibilities.



This is a comprehensive study, unique in pedagogy, clarity, and
originality. It uses the full range of critical scholarship on hasidism as a
social and ideological movement. At the same time, it maintains a strong focus
on hasidic Torah commentary as a conveyor of theology and value. Each of its
chapters presents a fundamentally new approach. Wiskind-Elper’s translations
are in themselves an innovative moment in the tradition and spiritual history
of the passages she offers.