Download or read book Authority and Dissent in Jewish Life written by Leonard J. Greenspoon and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the long history of Judaism, many individuals and groups have sought to wield authority on the basis of unique religious, social, familial, military, or political claims. Moving historically from the biblical period to the modern-day State of Israel, Authority and Dissent in Jewish Life discusses a range of those claims to authority from within the Jewish community itself. There is no single paradigm that characterizes these instances. Yet again and again the same causes of disagreement arise: interpretation and application of authoritative texts, appropriate ways to remember and memorialize figures from the past, the extent to which traditional leadership roles should (or should not) change in keeping with new cultural or political contexts, the degree to which long-held beliefs and long-practiced rituals are (or are not) susceptible to modification or abandonment, and the tension members of a Jewish community may feel when their leaders make pronouncements at odds with the political policies of the secular state in which they live. Written accessibly, the essays in this collection examine these phenomena from a wide variety of approaches, genres, and media. They pay close attention to the historical and religious settings of the controversies they analyze, yet also allow for ample reflection on the larger issues of authority and dissent that each occurrence raises.
Download or read book Authority Power and Leadership in the Jewish Polity written by Daniel Judah Elazar and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1991 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An informative exploration of the Jewish polity from biblical times to the present.
Download or read book The Jewish Political Tradition written by Michael Walzer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-15 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book launches a landmark four-volume collaborative work exploring the political thought of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present. The texts and commentaries in Volume I address the basic question of who ought to rule the community."--Descripción del editor.
Download or read book Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics written by Daniel Frank and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines dissent from rabbinic Judaism in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period to consider it as a category within the history and culture of the Jewish people. The influential leaders, institutions, and texts that make up rabbinic culture have held a central place in Judaism since the Middle Ages and have given Jewish cultures across the world remarkably uniform systems of law and doctrines into the modern period. Even so, dissent from mainstream rabbinic culture always existed, prompted by matters such as textual interpretation, differences of authority, and definitions of spirituality. Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics exposes some of the views of these often-overlooked critics, sectarians, and so-called heretics as an important historical category in Jewish culture. The book covers a wide span of time, from the days of the Babylonian Geonim, who first championed the Talmud in the early Middle Ages, to the period of the Maskilim, who promoted the Jewish Enlightenment in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In their introductory essay, Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish define Rabbinic culture and survey the various types of critiques leveled against it. Subsequent essays consider different forms of dissent in detail, including the Andalusian tradition of belletristic satire, Moses Maimonides' critical views of contemporary Jewish beliefs and practices, Karaite-Rabbanite polemics, the ambivalence toward rabbinic teachings among the communities of the Western Sephardi Diaspora, and the messianic movement surrounding Shabbatai Zvi. The essays in Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics offer a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on Jewish dissent within a traditional society that cuts across temporal, geographical, and phenomenological boundaries. The volume will provide informative reading for scholars of Jewish studies and anyone with an interest in religious history.
Download or read book Rabbinic Authority written by Michael S. Berger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rabbis of the first five centuries of the Common Era loom large in the Jewish tradition. Until the modern period, Jews viewed the Rabbinic traditions as the authoritative contents of their covenant with God, and scholars debated the meanings of these ancient Sages words. Even after the eighteenth century, when varied denominations emerged within Judaism, each with its own approach to the tradition, the literary legacy of the talmudic Sages continued to be consulted. In this book, Michael S. Berger analyzes the notion of Rabbinic authority from a philosophical standpoint. He sets out a typology of theories that can be used to understand the authority of these Sages, showing the coherence of each, its strengths and weaknesses, and what aspects of the Rabbinic enterprise it covers. His careful and thorough analysis reveals that owing to the multifaceted character of the Rabbinic enterprise, no single theory is adequate to fully ground Rabbinic authority as traditionally understood. The final section of the book argues that the notion of Rabbinic authority may indeed have been transformed over time, even as it retained the original name. Drawing on the debates about legal hermeneutics between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish, Berger introduces the idea that Rabbinic authority is not a strict consequence of a preexisting theory, but rather is embedded in a form of life that includes text, interpretation, and practices. Rabbinic authority is shown to be a nuanced concept unique to Judaism, in that it is taken to justify those sorts of activities which in turn actually deepen the authority itself. Students of Judaism and philosophers of religion in general will be intrigued by this philosophical examination of a central issue of Judaism, conducted with unprecedented rigor and refreshing creative insight.
Download or read book Rabbinic Authority written by Elliot Stevens and published by CCAR Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prominent rabbis from both the pulpit and academia examine how the rabbinate is affected by halacha, personal charisma, semichah, Reform minhag and the rabbi's own religious views.
Download or read book Moral Resistance and Spiritual Authority written by Seth M. Limmer and published by CCAR Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This foundational new book reminds us of our ancient obligation to bring justice to the world. The essays in this collection explore the spiritual underpinnings of our Jewish commitment to justice, using Jewish text and tradition, as well as contemporary sources and models. Among the topics covered are women's health, LGBTQ rights, healthcare, racial justice, speaking truth to power, and community organizing.
Download or read book Rabbinic and Lay Communal Authority written by Suzanne Last Stone and published by KTAV Publishing House, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dissent on Core Beliefs written by Simone Chambers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Difference, diversity and disagreement are inevitable features of our ethical, social and political landscape. This collection of new essays investigates the ways that various ethical and religious traditions have dealt with intramural dissent; the volume covers nine separate traditions: Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, liberalism, Marxism, South Asian religions and natural law. Each chapter lays out the distinctive features, history and challenges of intramural dissent within each tradition, enabling readers to identify similarities and differences between traditions. The book concludes with an Afterword by Michael Walzer, offering a synoptic overview of the challenge of intramural dissent and the responses to that challenge. Committed to dialogue across cultures and traditions, the collection begins that dialogue with the common challenges facing all traditions: how to maintain cohesion and core values in the face of pluralism, and how to do this in a way that is consistent with the internal ethical principles of the traditions.
Download or read book Judaism and Human Rights written by Milton Ridvas Konvitz and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Areligion or a culture like Judaism, at least three thousand years old, cannot be expected to be all of one piece, homogeneous, self-contained, consistent, a neatly constructed system of ideas. If Judaism were that, it would have died centuries ago and would be a subject of interest only to the historian and archaeologist. Judaism has been a living force precisely because it is a teeming, thundering, and clamoring phenomenon, full of contrary tendencies and inconsistencies. Although there are no words or phrases in Hebrew Scriptures for "human rights," "conscience," or "due process of law," the ideals and values which these concepts represent were inherent in the earliest Jewish texts. This volume begins with four essays on the concept of man's being born "free and equal," in the image of God. The underpinning of this concept in Jewish law is explored in Section 2, entitled "The Rule of Law." Section 3, "The Democratic Ideal," traces the foundations of democracy in the Jewish teachings in the Bible and the Talmud, which in turn influenced the whole body of Western political thought. Relations between man and man, man and woman, employer and employee, slave and master are all spelled out. Section 4 presents essays analyzing man's freedom of conscience, and his God-given rights to dissent and protest. Section 5 deals with aspects of personal liberty, including the right of privacy. Section 6, entitled "The Earth is the Lord's," deals with the Jewish view of man's transient tenancy on God's earth, his obligations not to destroy anything that lives or grows, and to share the earth's bounty with the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned. Section 7 delivers an analysis of the "end of days" vision of Micah and man's continuing need to strive for peace and not for war. The volume concludes with three new essays, dealing with contemporary issues: "In God's Image: The Religious Imperative of Equality under Law"; "The Values of a Jewish and Democratic State: The Task of Reaching a Synthesis"; and "Religious Freedom and Religious Coercion in the State of Israel." This enlarged edition is accessibly written for a general and scholarly audience and will be of particular interest to political scientists, historians, and constitutional scholars.
Download or read book The Jewish Political Tradition written by Michael Walzer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book launches a landmark four-volume collaborative work exploring the political thought of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present. Each volume includes a selection of texts—from the Bible and Talmud, midrashic literature, legal responsa, treatises, and pamphlets—annotated for modern readers and accompanied by new commentaries written by eminent philosophers, lawyers, political theorists, and other scholars working in different fields of Jewish studies. These contributors join the arguments of the texts, agreeing or disagreeing, elaborating, refining, qualifying, and sometimes repudiating the political views of the original authors. The series brings the little-known and unexplored Jewish tradition of political thinking and writing into the light, showing where and how it resonates in the state of Israel, the chief diaspora settlements, and, more broadly, modern political experience. This first volume, Authority, addresses the basic question of who ought to rule the community: What claims to rule have been put forward from the time of the exodus from Egypt to the establishment of the state of Israel? How are such claims disputed and defended? What constitutes legitimate authority? The authors discuss the authority of God, then the claims of kings, priests, prophets, rabbis, lay leaders, gentile rulers (during the years of the exile), and the Israeli state. The volume concludes with several perspectives on the issue of whether a modern state can be both Jewish and democratic. Forthcoming volumes will address the themes of membership, community, and political vision. Among the contributors to this volume: Amy Gutmann Moshe Halbertal David Hartman Moshe Idel Sanford Levinson Susan Neiman Hilary Putnam Joseph Raz Michael Sandel Allan Silver Yael Tamir
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume 2 The Hellenistic Age written by William David Davies and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.
Download or read book White Ethnic New York written by Joshua M. Zeitz and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of postwar American politics often identify race as a driving force in the dynamically shifting political culture. Joshua Zeitz instead places religion and ethnicity at the fore, arguing that ethnic conflict among Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, and Jews in New York City had a decisive impact on the shape of liberal politics long before black-white racial identity politics entered the political lexicon. Understanding ethnicity as an intersection of class, national origins, and religion, Zeitz demonstrates that the white ethnic populations of New York had significantly diverging views on authority and dissent, community and individuality, secularism and spirituality, and obligation and entitlement. New York Jews came from Eastern European traditions that valued dissent and encouraged political agitation; their Irish and Italian Catholic neighbors tended to value commitment to order, deference to authority, and allegiance to church and community. Zeitz argues that these distinctions ultimately helped fracture the liberal coalition of the Roosevelt era, as many Catholics bolted a Democratic Party increasingly focused on individual liberties, and many dissent-minded Jews moved on to the antiliberal New Left.
Download or read book Rabbi Outcast written by Jack Ross and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pivotal figure in American anti-Zionism.
Download or read book The Rift in Israel RLE Israel and Palestine written by S. Clement Leslie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-22 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject matter of this book, first published in 1971, is not less relevant, though less familiar, than the military adventures of Israel. For the book deals with the spiritual tensions that underlie and go far to explain the conduct of the country, standing as it does at the heart of some of the world’s most dangerous political conflicts. The superpowers confront at its borders. So do the ‘modern’ West and the force of Arab nationalism. It is the focus, too, of anti-Semitism, with its potential threat to the future of all Jews and of world peace. The questions here examined are rooted in the nature of Judaism and in the two distinct urges – religious and nationalist – that created Israel. Within its tiny territory some of mankind’s most urgent spiritual problems appear at their most intense. What do men live for: for themselves, their country, higher values? How these tensions are resolved will affect both the conduct of Israel, with its effects on the fortunes of all nations, and the thoughts of men everywhere about their own and their countries’ deeper problems. One section of the book deals with the institutions and policies of Israel as expressions of its inner spirit: the kibbutz, the army, the ingathering of exiles, the attitudes to Arabs within and beyond the frontiers, relations with world Jewry. Two final chapters describe and analyse the perennial problem of Jewish identity, seen in the light of the actions of a modern state.
Download or read book Kinship and Consent written by Daniel Judah Elazar and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1983 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-published with the Center for Jewish Community Studies, this volume is based on the finest fruits of a summer Colloquium of The Institute for Judaism and Contemporary Thought held at the Kibbutz Lavi in Israel. Explores Jewish political life and thought from the Biblical period to the present in order to ascertain the content and character of the Jewish political tradition and its relevance for our time.
Download or read book Conscience written by Harold M. Schulweis and published by Jewish Lights Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Profound and Stirring Call to Action in Our Troubled World from One of America's Great Religious Leaders "Conscience may be understood as the hidden inner compass that guides our lives and must be searched for and recovered repeatedly. At no time more than our own is this need to retrieve the shards of broken conscience more urgent." from the Introduction This clarion call to rethink our moral and political behavior examines the idea of conscience and the role conscience plays in our relationships to government, law, ethics, religion, human nature and God and to each other. From Abraham to Abu Ghraib, from the dissenting prophets to Darfur, Rabbi Harold Schulweis probes history, the Bible and the works of contemporary thinkers for ideas about both critical disobedience and uncritical obedience. He illuminates the potential for evil and the potential for good that rests within us as individuals and as a society. By questioning religion's capacity and will to break from mindless conformity, Rabbi Schulweis challenges us to counter our current suppressive culture of obedience with the culture of moral compassion, and to fulfill religion s obligation to make room for and carry out courageous moral dissent."
