Nathan Wolski is a lecturer in the Australian Centre of Jewish Civilisation at Monash University who has a special interest in the Zohar and Yiddish. He’s an author, translator and member of Di Farborgene Khalyastre (“The Hidden Group”).

Our conversation meanders through a range of topics including reality and the mystical experience, professional dreamers, Kabbalistic conceptions of God, rationalism vs mysticism, Aaron and Hillel Zeitlin, the overlap between physics and the Zohar, and more.

Books and concepts mentioned in today’s conversation:

• Esh Kodesh

• Midrash Tanchuma 

• Menachem Mendel of Kotzh 

• Mah (What) vs Mi (Who) in the Hakdama (Introduction) to the Zohar 

• Wallace Stevens: Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction

• Encounters at the End of the World (A Werner Herzog film) 

• Tetragrammaton

• Blue Octavo Notebooks by Franz Kafka 

• A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar by Melila Hellner-Eshed

• Seekers of the Face Secrets of the Idra Rabba (The Great Assembly) of the Zohar by Melila Hellner-Eshed

• God and the Big Bang by Daniel C. Matt

• “Revenge of Myth” from Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism by Gershom Scholem

• Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking by Michael Fishbane

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