Download or read book Jewish Liturgical Reasoning written by Steven Kepnes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liturgy, a complex interweaving of word, text, song, and behavior is a central fixture of religious life in the Jewish tradition. It is unique in that it is performed and not merely thought. Because liturgy is performed by a specific group at a specific time and place it is mutable. Thus, liturgical reasoning is always new and understandings of liturgical practices are always evolving. Liturgy is neither preexisting nor static; it is discovered and revealed in every liturgical performance. Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is an attempt to articulate the internal patterns of philosophical, ethical, and theological reasoning that are at work in synagogue liturgies. This book discusses the relationship between internal Jewish liturgical reasoning and the variety of external philosophical and theological forms of reasoning that have been developed in modern and post liberal Jewish philosophy. Steven Kepnes argues that liturgical reasoning can reorient Jewish philosophy and provide it with new tools, new terms of discourse and analysis, and a new sensibility for the twenty-first century. The formal philosophical study of Jewish liturgy began with Moses Mendelssohn and the modern Jewish philosophers. Thus the book focuses, in its first chapters, on the liturgical reasoning of Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. However, it attempts to augment and further develop the liturgical reasoning of these figures with methods of study from Hermeneutics, Semiotic theory, post liberal theology, anthropology and performance theory. These newer theories are enlisted to help form a contemporary liturgical reasoning that can respond to such events as the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and interfaith dialogue between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Download or read book Jewish Liturgical Reasoning written by Steven Kepnes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is an articulation of the philosophical, ethical, and theological reasoning of synagogue liturgies. The book uses insights from modern Jewish philosophy together with contemporary hermeneutics, semiotics, and postliberal theology to develop new terms of discourse and a new sensibility for Jewish philosophy in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book German Jewish Thought Between Religion and Politics written by Christian Wiese and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-03-30 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Enlightenment period, German-Jewish intellectuals have been prominent voices in the multi-facetted discourse on the reinterpretation of Jewish tradition in light of modern thinking. Paul Mendes-Flohr, one of the towering figures of current scholarship on German-Jewish intellectual history, has made invaluable contributions to a better understanding of the religious, cultural and political dimensions of these thinkers’ encounter with German and European culture, including the tension between their loyalty to Judaism and the often competing claims of non-Jewish society and culture. This volume assembles essays by internationally acknowledged scholars in the field who intend to honor Mendes-Flohr’s work by portraying the abundance of religious, philosophical, aesthetical and political aspects dominating the thinking of those famous thinkers populating German Jewry's rich and complex intellectual world in the modern period. It also provides a fresh theoretical outlook on trends in Jewish intellectual history, raising new questions concerning the dialectics of assimilation. In addition to that, the volume sheds light on thinkers and debates that hitherto have not been accorded full scholarly attention.
Download or read book The Future of Jewish Theology written by Steven Kepnes and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging argument for the future of Jewish theology, written by a renowned Jewish scholar, provides a rounded introduction to the faith, its history, and its place in the modern world. Explores foundational Jewish structures and concepts through the discussion and interpretation of Jewish texts Argues that we must acknowledge holiness as a ritual and ethical reality in order to heal the rift between different forms of Jewish practice and theology Covers historical context as well as the relations between Judaism, Israel and the wider world today Speaks to both Jews and non-Jews and demonstrates through textual readings how Jews, Christians, and Muslims can understand and share their theological riches
Download or read book Cursing the Christians written by Ruth Langer and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Langer offers an in-depth study of the birkat haminim, a Jewish prayer for the removal of those categories of human being who prevent the messianic redemption and the society envisioned for it. In its earliest form, the prayer cursed Christians, apostates to Christianity, sectarians, and enemies of Israel. Drawing on the shifting liturgical texts, polemics, and apologetics concerning the prayer, Langer traces the transformation of the birkat haminim from what functioned without question in the medieval world as a Jewish curse of Christians, through its early modern censorship by Christians, to its modern transformation within the Jewish world into a general petition that God remove evil from the world. Christian censorship played a crucial role in this transformation of the prayer; however, Langer argues that the truest transformation in meaning resulted from Jewish integration into Western culture. Eventually, the prayer shed its references to any specific category of human being and lost its function as a curse. Reconciliation between Jews and Christians today requires both communities to confront a long history of prejudice. Ruth Langer shows through the birkat haminim how the history of one liturgical text chronicled Jewish thinking about Christians over hundreds of years.
Download or read book A Companionable Way written by Lisa M. Hess and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today's polarized publics, we are rarely prepared to encounter one another peaceably and deeply across irreconcilable difference. A Companionable Way invites inquisitive minds, body-souls, and spiritual hearts into the delightful but demanding inner work required for peaceable encounters with integrity across interreligious and intercultural difference. Unmet yearnings and the unconscious refusal of deep feeling in so many of our cultures need redress, not only within scholarly-analytical habits of mind but also in aging communal "containers" not adept at holding deep feeling without harm. Ancient but 'new' containers today--webs of spiritual friendship and circle-way communities of practice--offer hope for new learning and formative encounters with difference toward an expressive delight able to companion the suffering of self and others. Part memoir of a deep-feeling academic, part toolbox for the curiously contemplative, A Companionable Way witnesses to the deeply rooted Sacred available to each of us in a return to the body, devotion in conscious love, and new ways of being human together across irreconcilable difference, held gently in a patient and living wisdom particular to each but needed by all.
Download or read book Winged Words Benjamin Rosenzweig and the Life of Quotation written by Benjamin E. Sax and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to explore the role of quotation in modern Jewish thought. Weaving back and forth from Benjamin to Rosenzweig, the book searches for the recovery of concealed and lost meaning in the community of letters, sacred scripture, the collecting of books, storytelling, and the life of liturgy. It also explores how the legacy of Goethe can be used to develop new strata of religious and Jewish thought. We learn how quotation is the binding tissue that links language and thought, modernity and tradition, religion and secularism as a way of being in the world.
Download or read book To Heal the World written by Jonathan Neumann and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A devastating critique of the presumed theological basis of the Jewish social justice movement—the concept of healing the world. What is tikkun olam? This obscure Hebrew phrase means literally “healing the world,” and according to Jonathan Neumann, it is the master concept that rests at the core of Jewish left wing activism and its agenda of transformative change. Believers in this notion claim that the Bible asks for more than piety and moral behavior; Jews must also endeavor to make the world a better place. In a remarkably short time, this seemingly benign and wholesome notion has permeated Jewish teaching, preaching, scholarship and political engagement. There is no corner of modern Jewish life that has not been touched by it. This idea has led to overwhelming Jewish participation in the social justice movement, as such actions are believed to be biblically mandated. There's only one problem: the Bible says no such thing. In this lively theological polemic, Neumann shows how tikkun olam, an invention of the Jewish left, has diluted millennia of Jewish practice and belief into a vague feel-good religion of social justice. Neumann uses religious and political history to debunk this pernicious idea, and shows how the Bible was twisted by Jewish liberals to support a radical left-wing agenda. In To Heal the World?, Neumann explains how the Jewish Renewal movement aligned itself with the New Left of the 1960s, and redirected the perspective of the Jewish community toward liberalism and social justice. He exposes the key figures responsible for this effort, shows that it lacks any real biblical basis, and outlines the debilitating effect it has had on Judaism itself.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology written by Steven Kepnes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology offers an overview of Jewish theology, an aspect of Judaism that is equal in importance to law and ethics. Covering the period from antiquity to the present, the volume focuses on what Jews believe about God and also about the relation of God to humans and the world. Parts I and II cover exciting new research in Jewish biblical and rabbinic theology, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah (mysticism), and liturgy. Parts III and IV turn to modern theology with an exploration of works by leading figures, such as Rabbi Abraham I. Kook, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the relation of theology to issues such as feminism and the Holocaust, and the relation of Judaism to other world religions. In Part V, the book explores how the insights of analytic philosophy have been integrated with Jewish theology.
Download or read book Pledges of Jewish Allegiance written by David Ellenson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-18 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1700s, when the Jewish community ceased to be a semiautonomous political unit in Western Europe and the United States and individual Jews became integrated—culturally, socially, and politically—into broader society, questions surrounding Jewish status and identity have occupied a prominent and contentious place in Jewish legal discourse. This book examines a wide array of legal opinions written by nineteenth- and twentieth-century orthodox rabbis in Europe, the United States, and Israel. It argues that these rabbis' divergent positions—based on the same legal precedents—demonstrate that they were doing more than delivering legal opinions. Instead, they were crafting public policy for Jewish society in response to Jews' social and political interactions as equals with the non-Jewish persons in whose midst they dwelled. Pledges of Jewish Allegiance prefaces its analysis of modern opinions with a discussion of the classical Jewish sources upon which they draw.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy written by Steven M. Nadler and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive overview of Jewish philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present day.
Download or read book To Worship God Properly written by Ruth Langer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major influence on the development of rabbinic liturgical custom after the destruction of the Temple was the need to establish that this innovative worship of the heart was as acceptable to God as biblically prescribed sacrificial worship. Later Jewish communities and their leaders continually refined the details of the system they inherited to reflect their changing understandings of acceptable, meaningful, and constructive worship. Ruth Langer uses the tools of historical scholarship and anthropological study of ritual to analyze some of the dynamics that have shaped Jewish liturgical law and determined the broader outlines of the prayer life of the Jews.
Download or read book A Book of Life written by Michael Strassfeld and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2002 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive guide to Jewish spiritual practices, with explanations based on Talmudic and Midrashic texts as well as Hasidic and mystical stories, includes a survey of daily prayers, Shabbat rituals, holidays, Torah study, Jewish meditation, and more.
Download or read book Work for God s Sake written by Esther D. Reed and published by Darton Longman and Todd. This book was released on 2010 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The twin problems of today's 'high-pressure, burn-out' workplaces and unemployment make some Christian theologies of vocation seem idealistic. The global implications of the West's lust for cheap consumer goods pose major challenges to any moral case for prosperity. In Work, for God's Sake, Esther Reed tackles these questions within a biblical framework, and sketches a theological ethic of work in the hope of God's coming kingdom." Treats "key issues such as vocation, liturgy, social justice, and human rights in the workplace."--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Thinking about the Prophets written by Kenneth Seeskin and published by Jewish Publication Society. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking the great literary prophets whose ministry ran from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE—Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Isaiah, and Job—Thinking about the Prophets examines their often-shocking teachings in light of their times, their influence on later Western and Jewish thinkers, and their enduring lessons for all of us. As a noted scholar of Jewish philosophy, Kenneth Seeskin teases out philosophical, ethical, and theological questions in the writings, such as the nature of moral reasoning, the divine persona, divine providence, the suffering of the innocent, the power of repentance, and what it means to believe in a monotheistic conception of God. Seeskin demonstrates that great ideas are not limited by time or place, but rather once put forth, take on a life of their own. Thus he interweaves the medieval and modern philosophers Maimonides, Kant, Cohen, Buber, Levinas, Heschel, and Soloveitchik, all of whom read the prophets and had important things to say as a result. We come to see the prophets perhaps in equal measure as divinely authorized whistle-blowers and profound thinkers of the human condition. Readers of all levels will find this volume an accessible and provoking introduction to the enduring significance of biblical prophecy.
Download or read book Homiletic and Catechetic Studies written by Albert Meyenberg and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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.
