Do you speak "Student"?
I'm counting that among the languages I'll have to learn when I return to school in the Fall.
The Academy, from which I've been absent about a quarter century, doesn't function the way the business world does. For one thing, the academy uses more syllables. Do business people regularly, or ever, use a word that has as many syllables as, say, epistemological?
For another thing, the overweening and overbearing bureaucracy of most academic institutions is stunning. I see where I'm going to have to get all up-to-date on my vaccines, as if I were Middle Daughter trekking off to the Steppes of Asia. I'll have to register for courses, and petition committees of the faculty to accept my proposed course of study, and get various approvals from various deans . . .
On the other hand -- how different is that, really, from the business world? You want to do something, you usually have to put your plan in writing and get several layers of approval. You have to talk a good game.
But in the business world, that talk is business-speak. In the Academy, you have to speak "student."
Oh -- I'll have to learn Hebrew, too. I mean really learn Hebrew. And pass a reading exam in another language (most likely German), before it's all said and done.
James Robinson, a professor in the History of Judaism at the Divinity School, has been very supportive of my mid-life adventure. I asked him which other professors I should meet before choosing courses for the Fall.
His advice: You don't need to meet them. You need to read them.
Ah, of course, I thought. Academic networking is an exchange of ideas, not contact information. The monograph is the business card of the Academy.
I just finished reading three works, recommended to me by Professor Robinson, on the "ecstatic Kabbalah" of Abraham Abulafia, 
a 13th-century Spanish Kabbalist who came to be convinced that he was the Messiah. After becoming convinced of this, he decided he had to meet Pope Nicholas III. Abulafia was persistent until an audience was arranged. Little did he know that Pope Nicholas had given instructions that Abulafia should be taken outside the gates of Rome and burned.
Abulafia was on his way to the audience when the Pope suddenly suffered a massive stroke and died.
Abulafia's radical idea was that you could achieve prophecy through the careful study and practice of meditation and chanting of various combinations of Hebrew letters. He thought that every Hebrew letter was a name of God, and therefore every combination of letters another Divine name with different mystical properties. He believed that, when one achieved the highest levels of prophecy, the student became, in a sense, one with the Divine. Having achieved that, Abulafia figured he must be a Messianic figure. He lived as an itinerant mystic, traveling and teaching throughout Europe until his death at the age of 50.
Why is this interesting to me? Because I think it's an early example of Judaism using meditative practice to discover Oneness.
Because Abulafia was a master of non-attachment.
Because he spent his life teaching that mystical experiences are accessible to anyone.
Because he was a nut.
Because there's power in the Hebrew language.
Because it's part of Jewish history.
And because he taught Jewish meditation seven centuries before it was cool.
--T.A.
