Judaism Books - Page 5

Our Immoral Soul: A Manifesto of Spiritual Disobedience

Nilton Bonder

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Rabbi Bonder turns a few conventional religious ideas on their heads as he examines the Bible and other Jewish teachings to identify the forces at play in individual, social, and spiritual transformation. Religious conformists believe that obeying the established moral order will lead to the salvation of our souls. On the contrary, says Bonder, the human spirit is nourished by what society labels immoral. Even the Bible legitimizes the notion that we have a God-given urge to rebel against the status quo in order to evolve, grow, and ascend. It is this "immoral" soul of ours that impels us to do battle with God—and out of this clash, Bonder predicts, a new humanity will emerge. In the course of discussion, the author examines a variety of intriguing issues touching on religion, science, and culture, including the teachings of evolutionary psychology; the relation of body and soul; infidelity in marriage; anti-Semitism and the Jew as traitor; transgression, sacrifice, and redemption in Judaism and Christianity; and the Messiah as archetypal transgressor.

The Duties of the Heart

Bahya Ben Joseph Ibn Pakuda, Yaakov Feldman, Bachya Ibn Pakuda

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Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Suny Series in Jewish Philosophy)

Tamar M. Rudavsky

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Editorial Review:

Traces the development of the concepts of time, cosmology, and creation in medieval Jewish philosophy.

Despite the importance of time and cosmology to Western thought, surprisingly little attention has been paid to these issues in histories of Jewish philosophy. Focusing on how medieval philosophers constructed a philosophical theology that was sensitive to religious constraints and yet also incorporated compelling elements of science and philosophy, T. M. Rudavsky traces the development of the concepts of time, cosmology, and creation in the writings of Ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, Gersonides, Crescas, Spinoza, and others.

The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture

Laurence J. Silberstein

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A New Light on the Israeli Predicament 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 24 people found this review helpful.

The state of Israel is now more prosperous and powerful than at any time in its short history. It has the most vibrant economy in the Middle East. Many believe that the Zionist-Arab conflict, that had marked much of Israeli history in its first half century, is now coming to a peaceful closure. Israel, and the Zionist ideology that led to its establishment, is clearly on the winning side.

And yet, more than ever before, Israel is a fiercely divided society, obsessed with questioning its very fundamentals: its own ideological roots, its raison detre as a Jewish state, its sense of identity, its own historical narrative. In short, despite the unprecedented success of the Zionist project, there is no rest in Zion. The meaning of that Zionist project is hotly debated among Israeli intellectuals.

In this excellent book Laurence Silberstein produced the first comprehensive intoroduction, designed primarily for Jewish-American readers, on the state of the debate about the Israeli predicament. But Silberstein did more than just that. He was able to contribute original cultural insight--both on the theoretical and historical levels--that allows to decode and map the debate afresh even to its own participants. I expect this book would suprise and edify some of those participants.

This is an important book for all those who wonder (and care) where Israel is going.

Editorial Review:

Postzionism is a term increasingly used in Israeli public culture to refer to those who challenge zionism's hegemony. This is the first book to discuss and analyze the debates over post-zionism that go to the heart of Israeli national identity and culture.

Applying a framework drawn from contemporary cultural studies, postcolonial studies and the writings of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, The Postzionism Debates considers the arguments of the critics of post-zionism, who believe that it represents an effort to subvert the historical foundations of the state of Israel, and the proponents of post-zionism, who think it is a necessary prerequisite of Israel's emergence as a fully democratic society.

The struggle for postzionism is a conflict over national memory and the control of cultural and physical space. Laurence J. Silberstein analyzes the phenomenon of postzionism and provides an intervention into this debate.

Hope for Our Time: Key Trends in the Thought of Martin Buber (S U N Y Series in Judaica)

Avraham Shapira

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Editorial Review:

In this book, Avraham Shapira traces the history of Buber's ideas and locates underlying structures which unite Buber's thought. Ultimately, Hope for Our Time shows the connection between Buber's philosophy and his spiritual biography.

Seers, Sybils and Sages in Hellenistic-Roman Judaism (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism) (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism)

John Joseph Collins

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Editorial Review:

This volume brings together essays written over two decades by a leading authority in the field. The collection includes 2 recent essays that are published here for the first time. The articles cover major aspects of the discussion of Jewish apocalypticism, in relation to the Hebrew bible, New Testament and Hellenistic-Roman world. Distinctive strengths of the volume include clusters of essays on the Sibylline oracles and on the relationship between apocalypticism and wisdom. A section of the book is devoted to studies on Daniel.

Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture: A Modern Introduction

Victor Jeleniewski Seidler

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Editorial Review:

This is one of the first textbooks to try to set the entire discipline of Jewish philosophy in its proper cultural and historical contexts. In so doing, it introduces the vibrant Jewish philosophical tradition to students while also making a significant contribution to inter-religious dialogue. Victor J Seidler argues that the dominant Platonic tradition in the West has led to a form of cultural ethics which asserts false superiority in its relationships with others. He offers a critical reappraisal of the philosophical underpinnings of this western Christian culture which for so long has viewed Judaism with hostility. Examining the work of seminal Jewish thinkers such as Philo, Buber, Mendelsohn, Herman Cohen, Leo Baeck, Levinas, Rosenzweig and others, the author argues for a code of ethics which prioritises particular and personal moral responsibility rather than the impersonal and universal emphases of the Greek tradition. His provocative and original overview of Jewish philosophy uncovers a vital and neglected tradition of thought which works against the likelihood of a Holocaust recurring.

Paradigms in Jewish Philosophy

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Editorial Review:

Paradigms in Jewish Philosophy examines four key themes basic to teaching Jewish philosophy in the university, beginning with the fundamental questions of how Jewish philosophy is to be conceived and taught in terms of its definition and periodization. The need for inclusion of nonphilosophic texts is discussed, as is the formative modern period of Jewish philosophy. The book concludes with an analysis of the contributions of Emanuel Levinas.

Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God, With a New Introduction by Hilary Putnam

Franz Rosenzweig

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On how not do falsify reality! 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is a very difficult read! We can understand why the author withdrew the manuscript's publication during his life time (1886-1929), first published in 1992 after the author's prophetic thought became a source for the seminal endeavors of others, mostly notably that of Emmanuel Levinas.

I will not attempt to comment directly on the author's own language, translated from German into English. Instead I point to a person who, twice during the past year, would have profited immensely had he practiced its wisdom. I mean Pope Benedict XVI in his comments on Islam at the Unversity of Regensburg in September 2006 and his address to Latin American bishops in Brazil in May 2007.

While the pope, as Joseph Ratzinger, is well known for his reference to a dictatorship of relativism, what is at stake here is his own dictatorship of philosophical categories. Idolizing Platonic forms, Benedict has assaulted and insulted the religious faith of both Moslems and the indigenous peoples of Latin America. For the sake of a Christianity articulated in the categories of Greek philosophy, the pope has forsaken the historic experience of other peoples, seemingly blind to their otherness.

Mindful of a postmodernist deconstruction of historical articulations, we live in an epoch with an ethical imperative to recognize and acknowledge that to conceptualize experience is to falsify reality. With the subtitle of Rosenzweig's manuscript, "A View of World, Man, and God," we must realize, both as an ideation and in actuation, that world, man and God are analytical abstractions. It is their relationality that is really real, thus immune to the rationalizations of the human ego.

While we marvel that something exists, rather then nothing, we must not idolize these somethings into an Everything. Our lives are not absolved from radical contingency. The momentous momentum of human life is embedded in multifarious antecedents having multifarious consequences. In the spirit of Franz Rosenzweig, each day of our lives we think anew, the categories of our thought constantly renewed.

Editorial Review:

Franz Rosenzweig, one of the century's great Jewish thinkers, wrote his gem of a book in 1921 as a more accessible prcis of his famous Star of Redemption. An elegant introduction to Rosenzweig's "new thinking," Understanding the Sick and the Healthy was written for a lay audience and takes the form of an ironic narrative about convalescence. With superb simplicity and beauty, it puts forth an important critique of the nineteenth-century German Idealist philosophical tradition and expresses a powerful vision of Jewish religion. Harvard's Hilary Putnam provides a new introduction to this classic work for a contemporary audience.

History of Jewish Philosophy (Routledge History of World Philosophies)

Daniel Frank

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Takes a lot of knowledge for granted 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This massive book, consisting of contributions from 35 scholars, is obviously a valuable and learned resource for anyone interested in Jewish philosophy, and it contains much illuminating material. However, that it is "accessible to general readers as well as to scholars", as one of the blurbs on the back cover of the book reads, is true of only a few of its 39 chapters. The bulk of the book is certainly not suitable for anyone who is not already familiar with philosophy in general, with technical philosophical vocabulary in particular, or has a good knowledge of Judaism. In no way is this book comparable in approach and style with books written for the general public, such as Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (or, for that matter, my own Philosophy and Living). Indeed, the style of writing can sometimes only be described as constipated.

True, it is difficult (though not impossible) to write lucidly for the general public about medieval philosophy. The medieval chapters acount for some 400 of the 900-odd pages of the book; and very tedious they are, as philosophers debate over and over again such questions as whether the world was created ex nihilo or not, whether God has attributes or not (some thinkers considering attributes a derogation to God's unity), and how Free Will can be reconciled with God's foreknowledge.

The trouble lies in the relationship between Philosophy and Theology. Aquinas differentiated between, on the one hand, "Revealed Theology", which starts with Revelation about God as an indisputable given and as the basis of Faith from which Reason then makes certain deductions, and, on the other, "Natural Theology", which starts with the experience of nature or created things and uses Reason to argue from that experience - a process which, for Aquinas, aims at - and, rightly used, must lead to - an intellectual knowledge of God. Many medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers took the same line. Philosophy and Theology will part company when philosophers not only do not accept (as most medieval philosophers did) that the knowledge of God is the aim of philosophy, but actually use Reason to challenge the truth of revealed knowledge, including in extreme cases, the truth of the existence of God. Until that happens, however, it is not always easy to tell whether a certain argument is theological or philosophical.

The book under review raises this difficulty on occasions, but is then prepared to discuss as philosophy some positions which, to me at least, cannot be called philosophical at all. The most outstanding of these is the mysticism of the Kabbalah, the subject of a particularly obscure chapter (chapter 19) in the book. It is a legitimate philosophical position to show that certain parts of the Torah lend themselves to metaphorical interpretation so that they can correspond with Reason; likewise there is a legitimate philosophical case to be made that we need to allow for mystical experiences which are not subject to Reason. But to go beyond that and to describe as philosophical an exegesis of Biblical texts which depends on numbers or on letters to which numerical values are given is, to say the least, a distortion of the rational procedures which philosophy requires.

And what does it mean to describe any philosophy as specifically Jewish? It is most obviously Jewish when it concerns itself with matters that are peculiar to Judaism, such as the nature of God's Covenant with Israel. It is less uniquely Jewish when it applies the same philosophical concepts to Jewish sources (the Jewish Bible, the Talmud etc.) as Islamic philosophers apply to the Koran, the hadiths and the sharia. And what if the author is known to have been a Jew, irrespective of any specifically Jewish content in his philosophy? What about Spinoza, excommunicated by the Jewish authorities, consequently (as the chapter on him shows) evincing bitterness and hostility to Judaism, and developing a philosophy which has nothing to do with Judaism?

Spinoza arguably draws less on the thinkers of other traditions than any of the other philosophers mentioned in the book. I would argue that he is one of the four Jewish-born thinkers whose originality has massively influenced European civilization. (The other three, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, are not included in this book, the first two presumably because they are not considered philosophers.) What the book brings out very strongly is how all the other major post-biblical Jewish thinkers were influenced by the non-Jewish environment in which they lived and so by the thought of non-Jewish philosophers. It traces the influence of Hellenism on such as Philo of Alexandria; of the Islamic Aristotelianism of Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroës on Maimonides and the Maimonideans; of the Enlightenment on Moses Mendelssohn; of Hegelianism on the Wissenschaft des Judentums; of Kant on Samuel Rafael Hirsch and Hermann Cohen; of Herder and nationalism on Zionism. Only Maimonides, though himself influenced by Arabic philosophy, in turn exercised an appreciable influence over Thomist Christianity; and Spinoza, as I have already said, was central in shaping the Radical Enlightenment.

Spinoza could do this because in Holland the Jews were emancipated. Likewise there was briefly some relaxation of persecution in Renaissance Italy, in which context the Jewish Kabbalah was taken up by Pico della Mirandola and led to the development of a Christian Cabbalah. But these were exception between the time of Maimonides and that of Mendelssohn. During that period hardly any intellectual interaction between Jews and non-Jews took place. It was during that period that the Jews in most European countries were ghettoized and to some extent also ghettoized themselves intellectually, in that the rabbis at the time welcomed and reinforced this isolation. Although the ghettoes still existed in the time of Mendelssohn, he was himself accepted by the philosophers of the German Enlightenment; and once the ghettoes were abolished by the French Revolution, the fruitful interplay between Jewish and non-Jewish thought could again resume.

Editorial Review:

Consciously writing from a Jewish background, thirty-five esteemed authors, from Britain, Canada, Israel, and the United States cover the whole breadth of Jewish philosophy, concentrating upon the philosophical interest of the ideas themselves.

The contributors to this work explore numerous issues raised in the text of the Bible and in the history of the Jewish people, and discuss the major schools of thought and most serious controversies of ancient and modern Jewish philosophy. Topics include postmodern techniques, the thought of Moses Maimonides, and philosophic studies of the Holocaust. Throughout this work, the authors insist on the importance of understanding the social and cultural context in which Jewish philosophy exists. The broad range of ideas in this volume makes it an invaluable sourcebook on the nature of Jewish philosophy.