The Holiness of the Heretical
This essay extends a constructive philosophical reading of Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz’s self-referential hermeneutics—the discovery that the interpreter is “already written” within the eternal text—into a wider question in the study of Jewish mysticism: what distinguishes heretical Kabbalah from its classical predecessor and how might a tradition that crosses into heresy remain, in some defensible sense, holy. Drawing on Gershom Scholem’s account of “redemption through sin,” Elliot Wolfson’s reconceptualisation of antinomianism as hypernomianism—the transgression that preserves the very boundary it transgresses—and the post-Lurianic doctrine of evil developed by Tishby, Liebes, Idel, Magid and Maciejko, I argue that heretical Kabbalah is best understood not as the negation of classical mysticism but as its catastrophic intensification. Where classical Kabbalah answers the problem of evil through the architecture of tzimtzum, shevirat ha-kelim and tikkun, heretical Kabbalah answers catastrophe by locating the redemptive task inside the rupture itself. The result is a theodicy that refuses consolation yet refuses despair—a holiness conducted from within the abyss.