Anna Sierka, “The Tangibility of the Secret: A Mystical View of the Senses”

The discussion on kabbalistic traditions about the senses will turn to the Christian phrase noli me tangere (Latin “Do not touch me”), which plays on the touching and absence of any touching in the resurrection of Christ, and thus engaging both touch and sight. The tactile sense will be explored in this inquiry through various sources, including palmistry manuals (touching the parchment), the text known as Shiʻur Qomah (“The Measure of the Height [of the divine body]”), and other kabbalistic texts about marital relations.

Anna Sierka earned her PhD at the University of Munich with a doctoral dissertation focusing on the adaptation of divine chariot (merkavah) imagery from medieval Ashkenazi esoteric sources in Lurianic Kabbalah. She has been a Golda Meir Postdoctoral Fellow and a Minerva Fellow in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard, and a Koret Fellow at Tel Aviv University. Her articles have appeared in leading journals including Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts, The Journal of Religion, and Harvard Theological Review. Her research explores shifts in esoteric and kabbalistic doctrines, their philosophical inspirations, and bifurcated anchoring detectable in other domains of knowledge, for instance medicine and astronomy, as well as in folk culture.