Kabbalah and Postmodernism: A Dialogue challenges certain long-held philosophical and theological beliefs, including the assumptions that the insights of mystical experience are unavailable to human reason and inexpressible in linguistic terms, that the God of traditional theology either does or does not exist, that -systematic theology- must provide a univocal account of God, man, and the world, that -truth- is -absolute- and not continually subject to radical revision, and that the truth of propositions in philosophy and theology excludes the truth of their opposites and...

A companion volume to Methodology in the Academic Teaching of Judaism (UPA, 1987), this book seeks to address the central issues of human life and meaning in the post-Holocaust world. Though representing a variety of disciplines and religious backgrounds, the authors are united by a fundamental recognition that after the Holocaust, the entire enterprise of being human has been called into serious question. Co-published with Studies in Judaism.

This book utilizes previously ignored or little known sources to provide new insights into how one of the most famous Jewish converts was viewed by the Jewish community he ignored and by the larger Christian world that would not accept him. Although Benjamin Disraeli was baptized prior to his thirteenth birthday, he could not escape his origins. Labeled as a 'Jew Scamp' by his detractors when he entered the political arena, he exploited his background to demonstrate the nobility of his ancient race and the superiority of his ancestral origins over those of his opponents. Rather than deny his...

This is a work of practical theology, a book not about Judaism but of Judaism. Talmud Torah does two things. First, in its pages, which highlight representative sources of the Oral Torah of Judaism, readers study about studying the Torah, which Rabbinic Judaism put forth as the way to God's presence.

This collection of seven essays draws on work done in 2010. The author takes up several topics in the systemic analysis of Judaisms and deals with comparisons of Judaisms. The papers include two commentaries on the current state of the academic study of Judaism. The reason for periodically collecting and publishing essays and reviews is to give them a second life, after they have served as lectures or as summaries of monographs or as free-standing articles or as expositions of Judaism in collections of comparative religions. This re-presentation serves a readership to whom the initial...

This book surveys the treatment of war and peace in the canon of Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity: to what does Judaism refer when it speaks of war and peace in the context of the Hebrew words "milhamah" (war) and "shalom" (peace)? But this study is not lexical. It is categorical. "War" represents a commanding, coherent category-formation, while "peace" covers a variety of circumstances and transactions. "War" is specifically a Halakhic category and "Peace" an Aggadic taxon. Do "war" and "peace" present us with a lexical or a categorical phenomenon? War forms a category-formation and peace...

There are only a small handful of mass deaths in all of history that have been deemed, by consensus, a genocide. The tragedy of the Armenians is not one of those events. For that reason, those who view the Armenian case as genocide have long sought to connect it explicitly to the single event that is most clearly associated with the word genocide--the Holocaust. Many ethnic groups in history have suffered massacres, forcible mass exiles, and the like. The Holocaust is unique in that it stands alone as the archetype of a rare class of historical events. Therefore, the effort to equate the...

Rabbinic documents of David, progenitor of the Messiah, carry forward the scriptural narrative of David the king. But he also is turned by Rabbinic writings of late antiquity--from the Mishnah through the Yerushalmi and the Bavli--into a sage. Consequently, the Rabbis' Messiah is a rabbi. How did this transformation come about? Of what kinds of writings does it consist? What sequence of writings conveyed the transformation? And most important: what do we learn about the movement from one set of Israelite writings to take over, or submit to the values of, another set of writings? These are the...

This book is an exercise in the systematic recourse to anachronism as a theological-exegetical mode of apologetics. Specifically, Neusner demonstrates the capacity of the Rabbinic sages to read ideas attested in their own day as authoritative testaments to -- to them -- ancient times. Thus, Scripture was read as integral testimony to the contemporary scene. About a millennium -- 750 B.C. E. to 350 C. E. -- separates Scripture's prophets from the later sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud. It is quite natural to recognize evidence for differences over a long period of time. Yet Judaism sees...

This book uses rhetorical analysis to illuminate one of the most fascinating and complicated speeches by Saint Paul: 2 Cor 10-13. The main problem of the speech regards Paul's claim to be a true servant of Christ and to have the right to boast about it. Paul proves he is strong enough to be the leader of Corinth and paradoxically demonstrates that weakness should belong to the identity of an apostle. Another issue regards the legitimacy of his boasting. The egocentric boast based on the comparison with his opponents is the one that Paul calls foolish, but he is forced, nevertheless, to...