Books by Avi Sagi

The relationship between morality and religion has long been controversial, familiar in its formulation as Euthyphro's dilemma: Is an act right because God commanded it or did God command it because it is right.

The book deals with identity in general and with Jewish identity in particular. The book rejects rigid and one-sided notions of Jewish identity and offers a historical-cultural analysis of the identity discourse.

The widespread view is that prayer is the centre 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.

The book grapples with one of the most difficult questions confronting the contemporary world: the problem of the other, which includes ethical, political, and metaphysical aspects. A widespread approach in the history of the discourse on the other, systematically formulated by Emmanuel Levinas and his followers, has invested this term with an almost mythical quality¿the other is everybody else but never a specific person, an abstraction of historical human existence. This book offers an alternative view, turning the other into a real being, through a carefully described process involving two dimensions referred to as the ethic of loyalty to the visible and the ethic of inner retreat. Tracing the course of this process in life and in literature, the book presents a broad and lucid picture intriguing to philosophers and also accessible to readers concerned with questions touching on the meaning of life, ethics, and politics, and particularly relevant to the burning issues surrounding attitudes to immigrants as others and to the relationship with God, the ultimate other.

Many of Brenner's readers assumed that Brenner completely negated Jewish existence and sought to form a new way of life completely disconnected from the traditional Jewish existence. This book deals with the question of the meaning and rationale that the writer Joseph Chayim Brenner attributes to Jewish existence.

Jewish Religion after Theology ponders one of the most intriguing shifts in modern Jewish thought: from a metaphysical and theological standpoint toward a new manner of philosophizing based primarily on practice. Different chapters study this great shift and its various manifestations. The central figure of this new examination is Isaiah Leibowitz, whose thoughts encapsulate more than any other Jewish thinker this stance of religion without metaphysics. Sagi explores corresponding issues such as observance, the possibility of pluralism, the meaning of penance without messianic suppositions, and pragmatic coping with theodicy after the Holocaust, presenting the different possibilities within this great alteration in Jewish thought.

Of all Judaic rituals, that of giyyur is arguably the most radical: it turns a Gentile into a Jew - once and for all and irrevocably. This title focuses upon a reading of primary halakhic texts from Talmudic times onwards as key to the explication of meaning within the Judaic tradition.

Offers answers to questions presented in Jewish literature, covering theological issues bearing on the meaning of the Torah and of revelation, as well as hermeneutical questions regarding understanding of the halakhic text.