Download or read book Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity written by Michael Fagenblat and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Negative theology is the attempt to describe God by speaking in terms of what God is not. Historical affinities between Jewish modernity and negative theology indicate new directions for thematizing the modern Jewish experience. Questions such as, What are the limits of Jewish modernity in terms of negativity? Has this creative tradition exhausted itself? and How might Jewish thought go forward? anchor these original essays. Taken together they explore the roots and legacies of negative theology in Jewish thought, examine the viability and limits of theorizing the modern Jewish experience as negative theology, and offer a fresh perspective from which to approach Jewish intellectual history.
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 Negative Theology written by Johannes Aakjær Steenbuch and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-09-23 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we speak about God if God is ineffable? This paradoxical question lies at the heart of one of the strangest traditions of philosophical and theological thought: negative theology. As a tradition of thought, negative (or apophatic) theology can be traced back to the convergence of Greek philosophy with Jewish and Christian theology in the first century CE. Beginning with a seemingly simple claim about the ineffability or unsayability of God, negative theology evolved into a complex tradition of thought and spirituality. Today, together with a growing interest in patristic and medieval studies, negative theology enjoys renewed attention in contemporary philosophy and theology. This short introduction presents an overview of how the tradition developed from antiquity until present.
Download or read book Emet le Ya akov written by Zev Eleff and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2023-11-21 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emet le-Ya‘akov comprises a collection of essays celebrating the career and achievements of Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter, who has served the American and international Jewish community with distinction in his roles as a synagogue rabbi, university professor, and public intellectual. These articles, like the honoree, recognize the importance of both history and memory, emphasize the necessity of accuracy in historiography, and do not shy away from inconvenient truths. They are divided into three categories that help frame the discussion around “facing the truths of history”: Textual Traditions, Memory and Making of Meaning, and (Re)Creating a Usable Past. The volume also includes a brief sketch of Schacter’s life and work and a bibliography of his publications.
Download or read book Hope in a Secular Age written by David Newheiser and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses premodern theology and postmodern theory to show the endurance of religious and political commitments through the practice of hope.
Download or read book Migrants in the Profane written by Peter E. Gordon and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theory Migrants in the Profane takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin's image of a celebrated mechanical chess-playing Turk and its hidden religious animus: "Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating in the realm of the secular, the profane." In this masterful book, Peter Gordon reflects on Adorno's statement and asks an urgent question: Can religion offer any normative resources for modern political life, or does the appeal to religious concepts stand in conflict with the idea of modern politics as a domain free from religion's influence? In answering this question, he explores the work of three of the Frankfurt School's most esteemed thinkers: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. His illuminating analysis offers a highly original account of the intertwined histories of religion and secular modernity.
Download or read book Beloved David Advisor Man of Understanding and Writer written by Naftali S. Cohn and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2024-06-07 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together the latest scholarship on Jewish literary products and the ways in which they can be interpreted from three different perspectives. In part 1, contributors consider texts as literature, as cultural products, and as historical documents to demonstrate the many ways that early Jewish, rabbinic, and modern secular Jewish literary works make meaning and can be read meaningfully. Part 2 focuses on exegesis of specific biblical and rabbinic texts as well as medieval Jewish poetry. Part 3 examines medieval and early modern Jewish books as material objects and explores the history, functions, and reception of these material objects. Contributors include Javier del Barco, Elisheva Carlebach, Ezra Chwat, Evelyn M. Cohen, Naftali S. Cohn, William Cutter, Yaacob Dweck, Talya Fishman, Steven D. Fraade, Dalia-Ruth Halperin, Martha Himmelfarb, Marc Hirshman, Tamar Kadari, Israel Knohl, Susanne Klingenstein, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jon D. Levenson, Paul Mandel, Annett Martini, Jordan S. Penkower, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Shalom Sabar, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Seth Schwartz, Sarit Shalev-Eyni, Moshe Simon-Shoshan, Peter Stallybrass, Josef Stern, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Elliot R. Wolfson, Azzan Yadin-Israel, and Joseph Yahalom.
Download or read book Tsimtsum and Modernity written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).
Download or read book The Sacred Power of Language in Modern Jewish Thought written by Shira Wolosky and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judaic cultures have a commitment to language that is exceptional. Language in many form – texts, books and scrolls; learning, interpretation, material practices that generate material practices – are central to Judaic conduct, experience, and spirituality. In this Judaic traditions differ from philosophical and theological ones that make language secondary. Traditional metaphysics has privileged the immaterial and unchanging, as unchanging truth that language can at best convey and at worst distort. Such traditional metaphysics has come under critique since Nietzsche in ways that the author explores. Shira Wolosky argues that Judaic traditions converge with contemporary metaphysical critique rather than being its target. Focusing on the work of Derrida, Levinas, Scholem and others, the author examines traditions of Judaic interpretation against backgrounds of biblical exegesis; sign-theory as it recasts language meaning in ways that concord with Judaic textuality; negative theology as it differs in Judaic tradition from those which negate language itself; and lastly outline a discourse ethics that draws on Judaic language theory. This study is directed to students and scholars of: Judaic thought, religious studies and theology; theory of interpretation; Levinas and other modern Jewish philosophical writers, placing them in broader contexts of philosophy, theology, and language theory. It is shown how Jewish discourses on language address urgent problems of value and norms in the contemporary world that has challenged traditional anchors of truth and meaning.
Download or read book Heidegger and Kabbalah written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many scholars have noted Martin Heidegger's indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, as well as his affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, Elliot R. Wolfson expands connections between Heidegger's thought and kabbalistic material. By arguing that the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger, Wolfson presents an alternative way of understanding the history of Western philosophy. Wolfson's comparison between Heidegger and kabbalah sheds light on key concepts such as hermeneutics, temporality, language, and being and nothingness, while yielding surprising reflections on their common philosophical ground. Given Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language, these innovative readings are all the more remarkable for their juxtaposition of incongruent fields of discourse. Wolfson's entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions.
Download or read book Heidegger and His Jewish Reception written by Daniel M. Herskowitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Daniel Herskowitz examines the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, he outlines the main patterns and the diverse Jewish responses to Heidegger. Herskowitz shows that through a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, Jewish thinkers developed a version of Jewishness that sought to offer the way out of the overall crisis plaguing their world, which was embodied, as they saw it, in Heidegger's life and thought. Neither turning a blind eye to Heidegger's anti-Semitism nor using it as an excuse for ignoring his philosophy, they wrestled with his existential analytic and what they took to be its religious, ethical, and political failings. Ironically, Heidegger's thought proved itself to be fertile ground for re-conceptualizing what it means to be Jewish in the modern world.
Download or read book Does God Doubt R Gershon Henoch Leiner s Thought in Its Contexts written by Jonathan Garb and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-04 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does God Doubt? shows that Rabbi Gershon Henoch Leiner of Radzin considered God to be revealed as doubt. Thus, according to this profound and important nineteenth-century Hasidic leader, doubt is an essential aspect of the human condition, and especially of religious life. His position is shown to be remarkably bold and unique compared to kabbalistic writing, and especially to the Hasidic worlds to which he belonged. At the same time, the roots of his thought are located in earlier discussions of doubt as one of the highest parts of the divine world. Doubt about, in, and of God is part of the Hasidic contribution to modernity.
Download or read book German Jewish Studies written by Kerry Wallach and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-10-14 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focussing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism—as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism—and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.
Download or read book The Genius written by Eliyahu Stern and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV Elijah ben Solomon, the "Genius of Vilna,” was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. This book offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence. While the experience of Jews in modernity has often been described as a process of Western European secularization—with Jews becoming citizens of Western nation-states, congregants of reformed synagogues, and assimilated members of society—Stern uses Elijah’s story to highlight a different theory of modernization for European life. Religious movements such as Hasidism and anti-secular institutions such as the yeshiva emerged from the same democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion that gave rise to secular and universal movements and institutions. Claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists, and the Orthodox, Elijah’s genius and its afterlife capture an all-embracing interpretation of the modern Jewish experience. Through the story of the “Vilna Gaon,” Stern presents a new model for understanding modern Jewish history and more generally the place of traditionalism and religious radicalism in modern Western life and thought. /div
Download or read book The Principles of Judaism written by Samuel Lebens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Lebens takes the three principles of Jewish faith, as proposed by Rabbi Joseph Albo (1380-1444), in order to scrutinize and refine them with the toolkit of contemporary analytic philosophy. What could it mean for a perfect being to create a world from nothing? Could our world be anything more than a figment of God's imagination? What is the Torah? What does Judaism expect from a Messiah, and what would it mean for a world to be redeemed? These questions are explored in conversation with a wide array of Jewish sources and with an eye towards diverse fields of contemporary research, such as cosmology, philosophical logic, the ontology of literature, and the metaphysics of time. The Principles of Judaism articulates the most fundamental axioms of Orthodox Judaism in the vernacular of contemporary philosophy.
Download or read book Cultic and Further Orders Semiotics of a Kabbalistic Culture written by Maurizio Mottolese and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an unusual investigation of kabbalistic commentaries on prayer and ritual from the viewpoint of cultural semiotics, this book attempts to illuminate the features of a lasting Jewish tradition, showing in particular the relevance of ordering structures in Sephardi Kabbalah.
Download or read book Not in the Heavens written by David Biale and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the origins and development of a Jewish form of secularism Not in the Heavens traces the rise of Jewish secularism through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the emergence of Jewish secularism was not merely a response to modernity but arose from forces long at play within Judaism itself. Biale explores how ancient Hebrew books like Job, Song of Songs, and Esther downplay or even exclude God altogether, and how Spinoza, inspired by medieval Jewish philosophy, recast the biblical God in the role of nature and stripped the Torah of its revelatory status to instead read scripture as a historical and cultural text. Biale examines the influential Jewish thinkers who followed in Spinoza's secularizing footsteps, such as Salomon Maimon, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. He tells the stories of those who also took their cues from medieval Jewish mysticism in their revolts against tradition, including Hayim Nahman Bialik, Gershom Scholem, and Franz Kafka. And he looks at Zionists like David Ben-Gurion and other secular political thinkers who recast Israel and the Bible in modern terms of race, nationalism, and the state. Not in the Heavens demonstrates how these many Jewish paths to secularism were dependent, in complex and paradoxical ways, on the very religious traditions they were rejecting, and examines the legacy and meaning of Jewish secularism today.
