Rebecca Lesses (Jewish Studies) has recently published two articles in the area of early Jewish mysticism.
"'He Shall Not Look at a Woman': Gender in the Hekhalot Literature," was published in Todd Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele, eds, Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses (Brill, 2006). This article engages in a gender analysis of early Jewish mystical texts in comparison with early Christian and Muslim mystical literature. "Eschatological Sorrow, Divine Weeping, and God's Right Arm" was published in April DeConick, ed., Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (Society of Biblical Literature, 2006). It discusses the theme of divine weeping as a metaphor for human sorrow for the tragedies of Jewish history, beginning with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. up to the Holocaust in twentieth-century Europe.
