Between Messiah and Monster: A Brief Biography of Jacob Frank   Jacob Frank — born Jakub Lejbowicz in Podolia in 1726, then a province of Poland and now part of Ukraine — was the son of Leib Buchbinder and Rachel Hirschl. Through his father he inherited a link to the scandal‑ridden Sabbateans, the heterodox Jewish movement that continued to uphold the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth‑century Ottoman rabbi, Kabbalist, and apostate whose doctrine of redemption

No God but the Gold Forged in the Furnace of Flesh: A Poem on Jacob Frank       Jakub Lejbowicz slithered east   Beneath a heretic’s curse.   A worm of rot, crowned in Ottoman dust,   He wore another man’s face —   Berukhiah reborn   Jacob Frank, Westerner of Podolia,   Messianic pretender.     In Salonica, blasphemy transmuted:   Sin kissed the breasts   Of someone else’s wife.   Torah pressed into palpable skin,   White fire turned utterly black.   Apostates writhed.   A th

Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life [complete] New on Academia.edu (DOC) Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life [complete]

Ludwig Wittgenstein Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life (Part One) New monograph on Academia.edu...

A Vagabond Jew from Lithuania: A Poem on Salomon Maimon It took a vagabond Jew from Lithuania   to strike the wick that Königsberg’s sage   had hid and let go out in dark’s old age.     Said the synagogue’s rude son:   Let there be German with a Yiddish tongue ,   and from his restless mind   concepts flowed   like fire onto the page.     With quid facti?  and  quid juris?    as his lamps,   he lit the lecture halls   and shadowed nooks   of Europe with flame incandescent,  

The soul of the king an out-of-tune lyre with harpstrings for guts – many sharps and flats. Sent by the LORD the holy pneuma's hand...

God turns -- and the fishes dance blue gold silver beneath a yellow sky. Another turn, the boughs of thick trees become as air: invisibly...

Cometh the Lion    Cometh the Lion, cometh the hour.   On his head is my name; on his back is my power.   The time is narrow, and the world is wide   And the Lion comes now with a spear in his side.     Look how he bleeds; his flesh is a prize   For the cross-hearted hunter with blood in his eyes   (Brimming red in the heat of the noon)   And vowing to return by the light of the moon.     ‘Come follow me,’ the Lion commands,   ‘Or the hunter will come and hack off your hands.

When we were there in the crooked hell of that scarlet and black room, the world was a useless idol broken and beyond repair. But now we...

Photo credit: Rachel Posner / Posner Family Estate, courtesy of Shulamit Mansbach, Haifa, Israel / yadvashem.org “Our holiday has been...

The Moses Tree From the tangle of its roots, To the nests in its hair The tree blazed white and blue. And the tree sang the Lord’s name...

And so the gods of lead and brass, The idols and their thrones, The teraphim made of fibreglass The mummified skulls and bones, Are...

By lamp and by oil, we hunger the hours as the dusk's frost sets in. There is time: The trucks to Treblinka are not ready yet and...

Prayer hall inside the Grand Choral Synagogue It is It is a place, It is a place, Makom, It is a place, Makom, where animal and man,...

When He planted in the earth a tree of life, a tree of death (the latter with a curse of woe) did God say that this was good? And when He...

Yehudah, I Make You Mine From out of the banks of the muddy  Jordan River, I make you  Mine.  Into shape I press the grit, into shape I...

My roots are split & my bone-bare branches brittle. I degenerate in a cruciformed landscape. There are many like me. Perhaps it’s a sign...

Abraham, it is time to leave your lonely tent. Find a vacant spot in the belly of your heart and learn to fear the Lord. Stop seeking the...

Before I had to chance to complete my creation I was cast down by the rebel angels and made to...

Lord, I have seen the inner workings of man and I am afraid. Poor and pathetic: he is corrupted from the start, living in a blasted...