"A real intellectual wrestling with one of the towering figures of twentieth-century thought. It shows an important thinker at the top of his game: we learn about Heidegger and we learn about kabbalah, but most of all we are offered an original philosophical study on the nature of language, being, and the art of revelation and concealment."--Aaron W. Hughes, author of Rethinking Jewish Philosophy "The Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, transmitted via the Christian Kabbalah to the German philosophical canon, entered Heidegger's thought through the back door without him having suspected it, where it lodged itself and shaped his core concepts. Such is the striking subterranean intellectual history that Elliot R. Wolfson excavates. The Kabbalistic side of the ledger is no less startling, for it turns out that Heidegger provides the key for a philosophical interpretation of the mythic imagery of the Jewish esoteric tradition. The spirited irony of this reciprocal illumination is like a digestif to a feast of texts and textual interlacings which many have suspected but none could elucidate except Wolfson.

"--Michael Fagenblat, author of A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism "By embracing a helix of competing paradoxes, Wolfson expertly shines the luminous speculum of kabbalah upon the darkening speculum of Heideggerean thinking to venture beyond all boundaries, opening a clearing for all future philosophical expositions of Jewish mysticism that would have otherwise been forgotten."-- Religious Studies Review.