emphasized the contemplation of the divine through an allegorized understanding of biblical law and prayer, as David Winston illustrates in his chapter. Robert Goldenberg develops his notion of rabbinic religion, as expressed primarily in the Talmud, as a law-based spirituality in which action counts far more than intention and feeling counts far less than intellectuality. There is nevertheless an ambivalent ascetic tendency within early Judaism, as Steven Fraade demonstrates. One of the unique ideas of classical Judaism, according to Fraade, is that life can be sanctified through the moderate pursuit of pleasure. Alongside the wellknown legal focus of rabbinic Judaism, Joseph Dan carefully describes a significant mystical current in which God may have been perceived as dual and in which magic could release divine powers in the cosmos.
The book's final division, on the Middle Ages, posits the fundamental importance of observing the law and the exegetical freedom to speculate on its theological or philosophical meaning. Frank Talmage has composed a detailed but elegant essay on allegory as a conceptual and hermeneutical mode in both philosophical and mystical circles. Ivan Marcus describes the German pietists who found spiritual rewards in extending ritual observance and enhancing prayer. Daniel Matt explains the Kabbalistic or mystical search for the esoteric significance of Jewish law as a response to rationalism. Observance of mitsvot, Matt shows, was in Kabbalah an effective means of maintaining the equilibrium of the upper and lower spheres. In the pathblazing final chapter by Moshe Idel, individual concentration as a technique for experiencing the divine is traced from its origins in Sufi Islam to Spanish and then to Safedian Kabbalah.