Books in the Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah series

Presents a study of the life and work of one of the most interesting, original and creative Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Among its various goals, this work is intended to familiarize the English reading public with Gordon's philosophy, which was developed at the beginning of the twentieth century in Hebrew.

Is Judaism essentially a religion of laws and commandments? Or do its sources reflect significant attempts at addressing the individual's inner life, existential crises and spiritual experiences?Inner Religion in Jewish Sources offers a comprehensive exploration of inner life in the Jewish sources from the Bible to rabbinic literature, from Medieval Jewish philosophy to Kabbalistic writings and the Hasidic world, where it gained particularly potent expressions. Addressing the issue from the perspective of comparative religion, it seeks to emphasize the commonality of processes of interiorization in various religious traditions, suggesting an innovative angle both in the study of religion and of religious thought. In doing so, it sheds new light on the inner aspect of Jewish religious life, which is all too often hidden behind the external and institutional aspects of the Jewish religion.

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.

Science in the Bet Midrash explores the religious thought of Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), one of the most influential Jews of the last thousand years. While covering many aspects of his religious philosophy, these essays focus on the way Maimonides elucidated and expressed the universalistic thrust of the Jewish tradition. Maimonides construed the election of Israel as a challenge, not an endowment. This challenge is ultimately addressed to all human beings, not just to Jews.

The study of Jewish political philosophy is a recently established field in the study of Jewish philosophy. While in older histories of Jewish philosophy there is hardly any discussion of this topic, recent editors of such books have found it useful to add chapters on it. Following the pioneering efforts of Leo Strauss, Ralph Lerner and Daniel Elazar, among others, political philosophy has gained its proper place alongside ethics and metaphysics in the study of the history of Jewish philosophy. This volume is another manifestation of this welcome development. Consisting of selected English-language papers the author published over the last thirty years, it concentrates on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, from Sa'adiah Gaon in the tenth century to Spinoza in the seventeenth. These were the formative periods in the development of Jewish political philosophy, when Jewish scholars versed in the canonical Jewish sources (biblical and rabbinic) encountered Greek political philosophy, as transmitted by Muslim philosophers such as Alfarabi, Ibn Bajja and Averroes, and adapted it to their Jewish terms of reference. The outcome of this effort was Jewish political philosophy.

Refusing to accept anything but ever-increasing levels of human responsibility within a religious framework, covenantal thinkers audaciously suggest that the covenant empowers humanity as it binds and inhibits divinity. This is a reformulation of recurrent issues within the Jewish tradition, and one which pays homage to the modern context from which it emerges. Hartman and Borowitz grew up in the same mid-century American academic and social environment, and the product of that upbringing has a significant impact on the subsequent theories which they promote. Both thinkers have attracted a considerable following, but very few scholars have discussed them together. Cooper here for the first time works toward understanding their work in comparison with each other, and with covenant as the central focus and framework.

Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber were giant thinkers of the twentieth century who made significant contributions to the understanding of religious consciousness and of Judaism. They wrote on various subjects, such as the Bible, the commandments, Hasidism, Zionism and Christianity, and had much in common, though they also differed on substantial points. Of special note is the intense and fruitful interaction that took place between them. Until now, scholars have not undertaken a comparative analysis of Buber and Heschel as eminent contemporary interpreters of the Jewish tradition. In this volume, Meir and Even-Chen have taken upon themselves the challenge of monitoring their agreements and disputes.

Although Maimonides did not write a running commentary on any book of the Bible, biblical exegesis occupies a central place in his writings, particularly in his Guide of the Perplexed. In this book, Sara Klein-Braslavy offers a collection of essays on several key biblical interpretations by Maimonides dealing with the creation of the world; the story of the Garden of Eden; Jacob's dream of the ladder; King Solomon as an esoterist philosopher; and the problem of exoteric and esoteric biblical interpretations in the Guide. Special attention is paid to Maimonides' methods of interpretation and to his esoteric way of writing. Some of the articles in this volume were originally published in Hebrew, and appear here for the first time in English.

Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the formative period of medieval Jewish philosophy, from its beginnings with Saadiah Gaon to its apex in Maimonides, when Jews living in Islamic countries and writing in Arabic were the first to develop a conscious and continuous tradition of philosophy.The book includes a dictionary of selected philosophic terms, and discusses the Greek and Arabic schools of thought that influenced the Jewish thinkers and to which they responded. The discussion covers: the nature of Jewish philosophy, Saadiah Gaon and the Kalam, Jewish Neo-Platonism, Bahya ibn Paqudah, Abraham ibn Ezra's philosophical Bible exegesis, Judah Ha-Levi's critique of philosophy, Abraham ibn Daud and the transition to Aristotelianism, Maimonides, and the controversy over Maimonides and philosophy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the central founder of the linguistic turn and the inspiration of countless works, inspires the search of this book for various linguistic functions: dialogic, aesthetic and mystical. The search investigates four modern Hebrew poets: Zelda, Yehuda Amichai, Admiel Kosman, and Shimon Adaf based on their family resemblance of intertextuality in their language-games.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been a period of mass production and proliferation of Jewish ideas, and have witnessed major changes in Jewish life and stimulated major debates. The New Jewish Canon offers a conceptual roadmap to make sense of such rapid change.

"e;Think of the disaster"e; is the first injunction of thought when faced with the disaster that struck European Jews during the Shoah. Thinking of the disaster means understanding why the Shoah was able to occur in civilized Europe, moulded by humane reason and the values of progress and enlightenment. It means thinking of a possibility for philosophy's future. Walter Benjamin, who wrestled with these problems ahead of time, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Emmanuel Levinas had the courage, the strength and the perception-and sometimes simply the desperation-to think about what had happened. Moved by indignation and the desire to testify, they felt the urgent need to address the cries of agony of Auschwitz's victims in their thinking.

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.

How did medieval Jewish scholars, from Saadia Gaon to Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, imagine a world that has experienced salvation? Is the Messianic reality identical to our current world, or is it a new world entirely? This work explores how a rationalist can remain calm in light of the seductive promises of the various apocalyptic teachings of Antiquity regarding the Messianic world.

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.

Explores important questions in both modern and premodern Jewish philosophy regarding the idea of faith. This book presents various manifestations of the concept of faith in Judaism as a tradition engaged in a dialogue with the outside world. It will function as an opening and an invitation to an ongoing conversation with faith.

The notion that the God of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, "the God of the Jews," is perfectly good is challenged by apparently immoral acts-by contemporary standards-of that God, as well as by the classic problem of evil. In this book, Jerome Gellman provides ways to question and overcome these challenges.

This book is devoted to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's discussions on the practice of prayer. Prayer is analysed across a broad and complex spectrum in Soloveitchik's work, and his writings describing and analysing the experience of prayer afford a profound insight into its diversity, ranging from existential crisis to communion with God.

Offers a new reading of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, exploring how Maimonides' commitment to integrity led him to a critique of the Kal?m, to a complex concept of immortality, and to insight into the human yearning for metaphysical knowledge.

Historical conditions at the end of the eighteenth century opened an arena between the formerly autonomous Jewish community and the Christian world, which yielded new departure points for philosophy, including revelation and philosophical reason, dialectically considered; rationalism as intellection and advancing consciousness; heteronomous revelation; historicity; and universal morality. In Modern Jewish Thinkers, Greenberg restructures the history of modern Jewish thought comprehensively, providing English translations of Reggio, Krokhmal, Maimon, Samuel Hirsch, Formstecher, Steinheim, Ascher, Einhorn, Samuel David Luzzatto, and Hermann Cohen, published here for the first time. The availability of these sources fills a gap in the field and stimulates new directions for teaching and scholarly research in modern Jewish thought, going beyond Spinoza and Mendelssohn at one end, and to popular twentieth-century figures on the other.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been a period of mass production and proliferation of Jewish ideas, and have witnessed major changes in Jewish life and stimulated major debates. The New Jewish Canon offers a conceptual roadmap to make sense of such rapid change.