This book is the first to study in-depth the “walking motif” of the Zohar. The Zohar is unique among Jewish mystical texts--and it is the premier text of them all--in continuously introducing and punctuating its teachings with references to its mystical adepts’ “walking along the road.” Despite increasing contemporary interest in the narrative elements of the Zohar, this major literary feature of the work has been either ignored or subsumed under the overall mystical character of this classic. By carefully cataloguing and analyzing the use of the walking motif, this study seeks to show that it ... More

This book is the first to study in-depth the “walking motif” of the Zohar. The Zohar is unique among Jewish mystical texts--and it is the premier text of them all--in continuously introducing and punctuating its teachings with references to its mystical adepts’ “walking along the road.” Despite increasing contemporary interest in the narrative elements of the Zohar, this major literary feature of the work has been either ignored or subsumed under the overall mystical character of this classic. 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 recognize the steady, if problematic, presence of a non-mystical dimension to reality, the domain of the mundane. This domain is characterized by an embrace of spatiality, a horizontal dimension that exists simultaneously and in tension with the sacred dimension, usually conceived of as a vertical, space-denying axis. Drawing support from such theorists as Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, this study presents a new understanding of the Zohar's use of the walking motif. It suggests that its paradoxical mixture of ubiquity and invisibility allows the Zohar to extend its drama of concealment and revelation beyond the realm of the mystical outward, into the realm of the prosaic.