Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s insights on the nature of mystic speech, I seek to unfold the relationship between the individual mystical experience and the sociopolitical outside that constitutes the other origin of the garden. It is the friction created by the passage of different social structures, institutions, and, ultimately, epistemological orders that gives rise, I argue, to a work of visionary art which ruptures conventional frameworks of interpretation. more

The present essay explores the place of gardens in the interplay of theology and hermeneutics in a range of Jewish mystical sources, from the classics of medieval Kabbalah to the devotional worlds of early Hasidism and the dazzling poetry of the twentieth-century author Zelda. more