I accidentally jumped ahead in Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives and stumbled upon a familiar and deeply significant drama.

Idel’s central claim is basically that Kabbalah has two distinct but related foci — a theosophist Apollinian focus, and an ecstatic Dionysian focus. These two foci stand in tense union with one another, exactly as they were (according to Nietzsche) in Greek tragedy. The two foci complement, but can, at times, seem to oppose one another.

But both together oppose something else — (and this is what has me so excited this morning) — and this something else is philosophical rationalism. In Birth of Tragedy the rationalist was Socrates. In Idel the rationalist is Maimonides.

I’ve always identified Hermes with the Apollo-Dionysus union — not because of any special affinity with either Apollo or Dionysus, but because Hermes is the god of divine conjunction (as symbolically expressed in Janus-faced boundary herms). Divine communication occurs not across distances, but through elimination of distance in ontological union.

Let us never forget that it was Hermes who bound and chained the benevolent but hubristic rationalist titan to the rock.

Perhaps this tragedy of vital intellection (toward transcendence) vs rationalist hubris of pure immanence recurs eternally.

In Judaism, Torah study is a form of worship.