This collection includes two symposia, on "The Renaissance of Jewish Philosophy in America" and on "Maimonides on the Eternity of the World," as well as other studies in medieval Jewish philosophy and modern Jewish thought. Contributors include: Leora Batnitzky, Ottfried Fraisse, William A. Galston, Lenn E. Goodman, Raphael Jospe, Steven Kepnes, Haim Howard Kreisel, Charles Bezalel Manekin, Haggai Mazuz, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Alan Mittleman, Michael Morgan, David Novak, James T. Robinson, Norbert M. Samuelson, Dov Schwartz, Yossef Schwartz, Kenneth Seeskin, Roslyn Weiss, and Martin Yaffe.

Jerome Gellman presents a new theology of the Jews as the Chosen People, addressing self-serving ethnocentric supremacy, cultural isolation, and defamation of religions other than Judaism. This book is traditional in taking chosenness and the truth of Judaism seriously, and in eschewing a theology of multiple covenants. At the same time, it is critical, rejecting previous concepts of chosenness, and innovative, offering for the twenty-first century a fresh way of seeing the Jews' place in the world. On this foundation, Gellman suggests a new approach to inter-religious understanding from a...

Jewish religious practice has been transformed by the Kabbalists of Safed in the sixteenth century. They brought new meaning and importance to many Biblical and rabbinic commandments and created new rituals that have become central practices for Jews of all denominations. This volume describes the origins of these traditions and explains the mystical meaning of these specific practices and rituals. Some of these innovations include: Kabbalat Shabbat, inviting the Ushpizin to the Sukkah, Tikkun Leyl Shavuot, and visitation to the grave of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai on Lag Be-Omer. This volume is...

Faith: Jewish Perspectives explores important questions in both modern and premodern Jewish philosophy regarding the idea of faith. Is believing a voluntary action, or do believers find themselves within the experience of faith against their will? Can faith be understood through other means (psychological, epistemic, and so forth), or is it only comprehensible from the inside, that is, from within the religious world? Is a subjective experience of faith fundamentally communicative, meaning that it includes intelligible and transmittable universal elements, or is it a private experience that...

The Angel of Jewish History casts a philosophical gaze upon the relationship between the traditional Jewish past and the present through the metaphysical worldviews of five formative Jewish studies scholars: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Amos Funkenstein, Gershom Scholem, Baruch Kurzweil, and Nathan Rotenstreich. Their hermeneutic worldviews and writings deal with the nature and formation of modern Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums, historicism, the image of the Jewish past and tradition, secularization, and God's status in present-day Jewish reality. In this volume, these issues are explored...

The studies comprising this volume, most of them appearing for the first time in English, deal with some of the main topics in Maimonides' philosophy and that of his followers in Provence. At the heart of these topics lies the issue of whether they adopted a completely naturalistic picture of the workings of the world order, or left room for the volitional activity of God in history. These topics include divine law, creation, the Account of the Chariot, prophet and sage, Mosaic prophecy, reasons for the commandments, and prayer. Special attention is paid to three lesser known but highly...

How can we characterize the uniqueness of poetic language? How can we describe the evasive enchantment of the paradox that is created by both universal and autobiographical expression? How does ordinary language function aesthetically while motivating the reader to acknowledge himself and to reveal how far his thinking belongs to the present, the future, or the past?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the central founder of the linguistic turn and the inspiration of countless works, inspires the search of this book for various linguistic functions: Dialogic, aesthetic, and mystical. The search...

The widespread view is that prayer is the center of religious existence and that understanding the meaning of prayer requires that we assume God is its sole destination. This book challenges this assumption and, through a phenomenological analysis of the meaning of prayer in modern Hebrew literature, shows that prayer does not depend at all on the addressee--humans are praying beings. Prayer is, above all, the recognition that we are free to transcend the facts of our life and an expression of the hope that we can override the weight of our past and present circumstances.

Publicly or secretly, traditional Jews increasingly doubt the historical reliability of the Torah. Here, Gellman provides an "old-fashioned" Jewish theology for accepting the contemporary critique of Torah and history. Gellman presents an outline of the scholarly conclusions, and then examines faith responses and rejects apologetic attempts to evade the challenge. The book elucidates the notions of Divine Providence and Divine Accommodation that then provide a basis for the thesis that for centuries Divine Providence has been guiding toward a non-historical, non-literal understanding of the...

Two basic approaches have shaped the identity discourse since antiquity. The essentialist view assumes that a person's identity does exist "somewhere," and the discourse on identity is an attempt to disclose it. People do not create their identity, they only realize it. The opposite, deconstructionist view, assumes that the identity is only a linguistic fiction; we have no identity outside our concrete history, which reflects a constantly ongoing dynamic change. The present book offers a third option. It accepts that identity is not a priori datum that precedes our existence but claims we do...