When I was growing up, I saw my father letting the flame of his Jewish identity burn down as low as it could go without extinguishing altogether. He viewed all formal aspects of Judaism with bemused indifference, alternating with sarcastic hostility; practicing Jews, he said, were perfect examples of people who, however smart they might be, “don’t have enough sense to step inside when it’s raining.” But my own experience of the American suburbs, where our family ended up at a moment when the remaining tracts of nature in the area were being steadily bulldozed and converted into new highways, malls, and subdivisions, left me with a lingering sense of spiritual absence. Almost all the history of my father’s family had been lost in the upheaval of their flight from Europe: I could not countenance the idea that our family would just step forever outside the nimbus or noose of Jewish identity as casually as it might step out of the car in a supermarket parking lot. I owed a debt to the dead, and I meant to pay. There was something intoxicating in the notion that I, the son of a non-Jewish mother and a non-observant father, might choose to blow on the flame of our Judaism through the actions of my own life, and so magnify its blaze no end.

I had a sense that this should be accomplished through an identification greater than mere cultural reference points—bageloxy—could supply. This made my actual encounters with observance all the more dispiriting. I hated praying. Orthodox synagogues were endlessly problematic in their intolerances. Reform services were intolerably denuded of authenticity. Either way, the services bored me silly. When I set out to study the canonical texts of Jewish belief, I discovered potent flashes of ideas and imagery, but there seemed, at last, just too much dross to plow through before getting to the sparkly bits. The books of the Bible were one thing, at least minus Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers. But the ritualized law seemed for the most part an object lesson in how to nurture obsessive-compulsive disorder.

This is where the writing of Gershom Scholem came in. Scholem, the German-born radical-humanist thinker who moved to Palestine after the First World War as an idealistic, if idiosyncratic, Zionist, is best known as the founder of the modern study of Kabbalah—a category of Jewish thought, prayer, and ritual practice that pursues ultimate truths about God’s nature, good, evil, and humanity’s role in the cosmos. As Scholem himself pointed out in the opening of one of his books, the Hebrew word “kabbalah” literally means “tradition,” and, in the sense that it composed “the tradition of things divine,” Kabbalah fed people’s hunger for a new and deeper understanding of conventional religious forms. Certain Kabbalists indeed extended their speculations so far that they were accused of redefining Judaism’s purpose. With their work, Scholem wrote, “the Torah is transformed into a Corpus mysticum.” At times, he appears to suggest that the intense study of this covert history might function as its own form of worship. For a bookish soul who balks at prayer and loves philosophical-historical reflection, this prospect can be awfully seductive.

In undertaking his study of the Kabbalah, Scholem conducted a herculean analysis of countless texts long viewed by Jewish historians as nonsense—the mad, titanic systems concocted by religious figures dancing on the brink of heresy, intent on grappling with the most profound, irrational mysteries of the universe. In so doing, Scholem single-handedly turned an obscure theological tradition into a formal discipline, and challenged academia itself with a lush, alien spirituality. Cynthia Ozick, the essayist and novelist, once wrote that, whereas Sigmund Freud “dared only a little way past the margins of psychology, Scholem, whose medium was history, touched on the very ground of human imagination.” Harold Bloom, the literary critic, went further still, declaring that, for many contemporary Jewish intellectuals, “the Kabbalah of Gershom Scholem is now more normative than normative Judaism itself. For them, Scholem is far more than a historian, far more even than a theologian. He is not less than a prophet.”

Though I would never have consciously framed the matter in these terms, I was one of those for whom Scholem loomed as a kind of prophet. In my twenties, I began reading his books insatiably after discovering his writing through the correspondence he conducted with Walter Benjamin—Scholem’s friend from adolescence and his most important contemporary intellectual inspiration and foil. When I moved to Jerusalem, in the summer of 1988, having fallen in love with the city’s physical splendors and historical depth, along with its relentless focus on questions of life’s ultimate purpose that my American world kept shrink-wrapped, I brought with me to Israel an old, battered paperback edition of one of Scholem’s most compelling essay collections, “On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism.” The cover bore a pink, yellow, orange, and white Tree of Life, suggesting a hallucination from the heyday of Haight-Ashbury. I might not quite have been waving my little psychedelic volume in the manner of a proto-revolutionary brandishing Mao’s Little Red Book, but the comparison is not altogether off base. For me, it effectively substituted for the Bible.

Scholem’s interpretation of Kabbalah supplied exactly the sense of intellectual excitement and imaginative fecundity that had been lacking in my attempts to envision a life within the framework of my father’s religion. His portrayal of the Kabbalists evoked a realm of mystics who succeeded in being absolutely subversive of Jewish tradition while somehow remaining within its historical folds. The book also gave theological weight to the revulsion I had felt at witnessing the destruction of nature while growing up in the suburbs. In his final years, when Scholem spoke about what form Jewish mysticism might eventually take in the land, he invoked Walt Whitman as a kind of neo-Kabbalistic muse. “Those of us who labor here as Jews in the land of Israel may find great interest in the book of poems by Walt Whitman, who a hundred years ago sang the song of America with a feeling of the absolute sanctity of the absolutely secular,” Scholem wrote. Whatever form the new, historically dynamic mystical experiment might take, he declared, it might be “embodied in naturalistic and secular forms of consciousness” that found their core Scriptures in the natural world rather than in any traditional religious concepts.

Such ideas seemed to make Judaism the engine of a radical reëvaluation of the entire human relationship to God, one that established a new role for humanity, beyond that of the obedient servant. By investing the individual with the ability to contribute to _tikkun olam—_the repair of the earth—Jewish mysticism connected “traditional Judaism with the hidden forces operating in the world at large,” Scholem wrote. And there was no fixed, uniform rule book for how this contribution was to be enacted. Kabbalah preserved the frame of monotheism while shattering the idol of monolithic truth. Scholem’s notion of truth’s absolute multiplicity was epitomized in a commentary he treasured from the sixteenth-century mystic Isaac Luria: “Every word of the Torah has six hundred thousand ‘faces,’ that is, layers of meaning or entrances, one for each of the children of Israel who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai. Each face is turned toward only one of them; he alone can see it and decipher it. Each man has his own unique access to Revelation.”