David J Halperin

"After reading two or three paragraphs the hair of my head stood up. Nothing like this was ever seen or known from any heretic or disbeliever of this world . . . and it certainly deserves to be burned." The Hebrew Kabbalistic text called I Came This Day to the Spring (Va-avo ha-Yom el ha-'Ayin) created a scandal among the Jewish communities of Central Europe when it surfaced, in manuscript, in 1725. It was obviously linked to the cult of Sabbatai Zevi, the would-be Messiah who drove the Jewish world wild with excitement in 1665 and converted to Islam the following year. Its author was the brilliant young rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz (1695-1764), soon to become one of the foremost preachers and rabbinic authorities of the era. Now, for the first time, Eibeschuetz's extraordinary book--a charter for the world religion of the future, rooted in Kabbalistic Judaism but unlike any religion ever known--is available in English translation, by a leading scholar of Judaism and its Kabbalah. It is not easy reading. But David Halperin's full annotations will give readers the guiding thread they need to follow Eibeschuetz on his amazing journey "to the spring of wisdom"--and beyond.

A voyage of exploration to the outer reaches of our inner lives. UFOs are a myth, says David J. Halperin—but myths are real. The power and fascination of the UFO has nothing to do with space travel or life on other planets. It's about us, our longings and terrors, and especially the greatest terror of all: the end of our existence. This is a book about UFOs that goes beyond believing in them or debunking them and to a fresh understanding of what they tell us about ourselves as individuals, as a culture, and as a species. In the 1960s, Halperin was a teenage UFOlogist, convinced that flying saucers were real and that it was his life's mission to solve their mystery. He would become a professor of religious studies, with traditions of heavenly journeys his specialty. With Intimate Alien, he looks back to explore what UFOs once meant to him as a boy growing up in a home haunted by death and what they still mean for millions, believers and deniers alike. From the prehistoric Balkans to the deserts of New Mexico, from the biblical visions of Ezekiel to modern abduction encounters, Intimate Alien traces the hidden story of the UFO. It's a human story from beginning to end, no less mysterious and fantastic for its earthliness. A collective cultural dream, UFOs transport us to the outer limits of that most alien yet intimate frontier, our own inner space.

Sabbatai Zevi (1626–76) stirred up the Jewish world of the mid-seventeenth century by claiming to be the messiah, then stunned it by suddenly converting to Islam. His story, and that of the movement he created, is a landmark event in early modern Jewish history and a dramatic example of what can happen when mystic dreams and messianic hopes combine in an explosive mixture. Now, for the first time, English readers can experience these events through the words of those who lived through them, in lucid and compelling translations by a leading authority in the field. Of the contemporary ‘testimonies’ translated by David J. Halperin, three are accounts by Sabbatai Zevi’s followers of the life and deeds of their messiah. These are the Najara Chronicle, an eyewitness narrative which Gershom Scholem called ‘one of the most extraordinary documents shedding light on Sabbatai’s personality’; Baruch of Arezzo’s Memorial to the Children of Israel, a sober yet devout biography of Sabbatai written shortly after his death; and the bizarrely fanciful hagiography composed in 1692 by Abraham Cuenque of Hebron. These narratives by Sabbatean ‘believers’ are supplemented by two seventeenth-century letters, pungent in their style and colourful in their details, in which Sabbatai and his followers are described by a contemporary rabbi who detested them and everything they stood for. Finally, a reminiscence of Sabbatai’s last days, preserved by one of the most independent-minded of his followers, conveys the enigma of the man who was to haunt the generations.

In Seeking Ezekiel, David J. Halperin argues that the biblical Book of Ezekiel provides substantial information about its author's psychology and reveals his personality in considerable depth. Psychoanalytic investigation of the book yields a coherent portrait of its author: a marvelously gifted yet profoundly disturbed man, tormented by inner conflicts over his sexual longings and fears.Ezekiel, Halperin argues, was dominated by a pathological dread and loathing of female sexuality. He expresses this emotional stance in the symbolic language of dreams (his vision of a temple polluted by idolatry); in a thin disguise of historical allegory (his obscenely graphic representations of Israel and Jerusalem as promiscuous wives); and in his self-described behavior at his wife's death.Ezekiel also demonstrates a deeply ambivalent attitude toward a dominant male figure. Normally, he projects the positive elements of his ambivalence onto his God, its negative elements onto other males. Yet the reverse can also take place, and this does much to explain the disturbing cruelty and arbitrariness of Ezekiel's God. Any psychological study of a man dead for 2500 years will run into formidable methodological difficulties. Halperin establishes the legitimacy of his approach by arguing that it permits the solution of a wide range of long-recognized textual problems. The implications of Halperin's study extend far beyond the boundaries of Biblical scholarship. The sexual pathology that he attributes to Ezekiel has afflicted humanity for most of its history, tainting the relations of men and women the world over. Ezekiel's powerful influence on posterity has done its part in strengthening the grip of this pathology. By understanding Ezekiel, people may come to a better understanding of his sickness within themselves and thus eventually come to find healing.