Editors: Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower), Galit Hasan-Rokem, Richard I. HaCohen and Ilana Pardes.  Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2016 (Hebrew).

This volume offers new perspectives on the intricacies of the exegetical imagination in different historical, artistic, and ethnographic contexts.  It calls attention to the changing definitions of Jewish arts and poetic writings, and the ever-surprising twists and turns in the reception of religious texts.

The exegetical imagination is a key concept in this volume.  In each of the included articles it emerges on both the artistic level – as molded by creators in their respective arts and styles, and on the level of scholarly interpretation.  In each, questions are exposed regarding the imaginary scope of the creators, as divulged through aesthetic,  philological, theological, semiotic, and political characeteristics.  This cultural-historical horizon enables the concatenation of the exegetical act within multifarious strings of creation that preceded and followed it.  Concomitantly, the imaginative exegetical act features an intensive search for an escape hatch, a possibility for a different mode of existence, that the embedding reality closed on, and which transpires as the secrets of that work are revealed.