Books by Michael Fishbane

A Centennial, writes Hebrew College President Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, is an opportunity "to ask ourselves what has changed and what has endured...to articulate our aspirations for the next one hundred years." Gathering incisive essays in Jewish studies alongside powerful personal stories, ¿iddushim celebrates a community connected to its source and brimming with spiritual and intellectual creativity as it looks toward the future.

Exegesis-interpretation and explanation of sacred texts-is the quintessence of rabbinic thought. Fishbane discusses the nature and rationale of this interpretative process in a series of studies on ancient Jewish speculative theology. Focusing on questions pondered in Midrash, he shows how religious ideas are generated or justified by exegesis.

Explores the question of the kind of canon, privileged status, or Logos, the Torah actually has for the post-modern Western Jew. This book documents the intellectual and spiritual odyssey of one of North America's foremost Jewish biblical scholars.

The lines of Michael FishbaneΓÇÖs book trace the spiritual face of Judaism in one of its many appearances. Fishbane explores the quest for spiritual perfection in early rabbinic sources and in Jewish philosophy and mysticism. The ΓÇ£kiss of God,ΓÇ¥ a symbol for union with God, and the ritual practicesΓÇömeditation and performanceΓÇöconnected with it are presented.The book identifies a persistent passion for religious perfection, expressed as the love of God unto death itself. The masters of the tradition cultivated this ideal in all periods, in diverse genres, and in different modes. Rabbinic law and midrash, medieval philosophy and mysticism, public and private ritual all contributed to its development. Rooted in the understanding that the spiritual life requires discipline, the sages set up different ladders of ascension. For some, the Law itself was the means of spiritual growth; for others, more private practices were built upon its foundation. But all agreed that the purification of desire and the perfection of the soul offered the hope of personal salvation. None denied the historical redemption of the nation.