Roads to Utopia : The Walking Stories of the Zohar

As the greatest book of Jewish mysticism, the __Zohar__ is a revered and much-studied work. Yet, surprisingly, scholarship on the __Zohar__ has yet to pay attention to its most unique literary device—the presentation of its insights while its teachers walk on the road. In these pages, rabbi and scholar David Greenstein offers the first examination of the "walking on the road" motif.Greenstein's original approach hones in on how this motif expresses the struggles with spatiality and the everyday presented in the __Zohar__. He argues that the walking theme is not a metaphor for realms to be collapsed into or transcended by the holy, as conventional interpretations would have it. Rather, it conveys us into those quotidian spaces that are obdurately present alongside the realm of the sacred. By embracing the reality of mundane existence, and recognizing the prosaic dimensions of the worldly path, the __Zohar__ is an especially exceptional mystical treatise. In this volume, Greenstein makes visible a singular, though previously unstudied, achievement of the __Zohar__. As the greatest book of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar is a revered and much-studied work. Yet, surprisingly, scholarship on the Zohar has yet to pay attention to its most unique literary devicethe presentation of its insights while its teachers walk on the road. In these pages, rabbi and scholar David Greenstein offers the first examination of the "walking on the road" motif. Greenstein's original approach hones in on how this motif expresses the struggles with spatiality and the everyday presented in the Zohar . He argues that the walking theme is not a metaphor for realms to be collapsed into or transcended by the holy, as conventional interpretations would have it. Rather, it conveys us into those quotidian spaces that are obdurately present alongside the realm of the sacred. By embracing the reality of mundane existence, and recognizing the prosaic dimensions of the worldly path, the Zohar is an especially exceptional mystical treatise. In this volume, Greenstein makes visible a singular, though previously unstudied, achievement of the Zohar . This is the first in-depth study of the 'walking motif' of the Zohar. The Zohar is unique among Jewish mystical texts in continuously introducing and punctuating its teachings with references to its mystical adepts' 'walking along the road'. By carefully cataloguing and analyzing the use of the walking motif, this study seeks to show that it expresses a concern of the Zohar that is surprising for a mystical text: to recognise the steady, if problematic, presence of a non-mystical dimension to reality, the domain of the mundane This book opens new perspectives on the Zohar, the greatest book of Jewish mysticism, by examining its unique approach to narrative.