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Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania
By Elliot R. Wolfson. 2014
This book explores the co-dependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Cohen, Buber,…
Rosenzweig, and Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, to differing degrees they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Derrida and Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence in these Jewish thinkers is symptomatic of a larger question. Recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology, a religion without religion, are not radical enough. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. The logic of apophasis, if permitted to run its course fully, would exceed the need to posit some form of transcendence that is not ultimately a facet of immanence. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis that surpasses the theolatrous impulse lying coiled at the crux of theism, an apophasis of apophasis, based on accepting an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute—that does not signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being’s core. Hence, the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift must give way to the more neutral and less theologically charged notion of an unconditional givenness in which the distinction between giver and given collapses. To think givenness in its most elemental, phenomenological sense is to allow the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.The Next Tabernacle: According to the Lord God's Word
By Charles Keech. 2006
Keech makes a powerful argument for building a new tabernacle. Citing scripture from both Testaments, he explains what the tabernacle…
was, why it was important, and why we must restore it.Anne Frank Remembered
By Miep Gies, Alison Leslie Gold. 2009
She found the diary and brought the world a message of love and hope. It seems as if we are…
never far from Miep's thoughts....Yours, Anne For the millions moved by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims. From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity. Each page rings with courage and heartbreaking beauty.Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire
By Richard Giannone. 2012
Hidden—Richard Giannone’s searingly honest, richly insightful memoir—eloquently captures the author’s transformation from a solitary gay academic to a dedicated caregiver…
as well as a sexually and spiritually committed man. Always alone, always fearful, he initially resisted the duty to look after his dying female relatives. But his mother’s fall into dementia changed all that. Her vulnerability opened this middle-aged man to the love of another man, a former priest and Jersey boy like himself. Together the two men saw the old woman to her death and did the same for Giannone’s sister. In Hidden Giannone uncovers how, ultimately, these experiences moved him closer to participating in the vitality he believed pulsed in the world but had always eluded him. The mothering life of this gay partnership evolved alongside the AIDS crisis and within and against Italian American culture that reflected the Catholic Church’s discountenancing of homosexual love. Giannone vividly weaves his reflections on gay life in Greenwich Village and his spiritual journey as a gay man and Catholic into his experience of caring for the women of his family. In Hidden Giannone recounts a gripping religious conversion, drawing on the wisdom of the ancient desert mothers and fathers of Egypt and Palestine. Because he was raised a Catholic, the shift is not from nothing to something. Rather, it is away from the modeling power of institutional Christianity to the tempering influence of homosexuality on the Gospel. Gay or straight, so long as we remain hidden from ourselves, the true God remains hidden from us.Racial Fever
By Eliza Slavet. 2009
What makes a person Jewish? Why do some people feel they have physically inherited the memories of their ancestors? Is…
there any way to think about race without reducing it to racism or to physical differences?These questions are at the heart of Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question. In his final book, Moses and Monotheism, Freud hinted at the complexities of Jewishness and insisted that Moses was really an Egyptian. Slavet moves far beyond debates about how Freud felt about Judaism; instead, she explores what he wrote about Jewishness: what it is, how it is transmitted, and how it has survived. Freudas Moses emerges as the culmination of his work on transference, telepathy, and intergenerational transmission, and on the relationships between memory and its rivals: history, heredity, and fantasy. Writing on the eve of the Holocaust, Freud proposed that Jewishness is constituted by the inheritance of ancestral memories; thus, regardless of any attempts to repress, suppress, or repudiate Jewishness, Jews will remain Jewish and Judaism will survive.A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe
By Geoffrey Hartman. 2007
For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in…
1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Generations of students have benefited from Hartman’s generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America. Hartman treats us to a “biobibliography” of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman’s unapologetic scholar’s tale.What Is Talmud?: The Art of Disagreement
By Sergey Dolgopolski. 2009
True disagreements are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them.…
The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement, and provokes unsettling questions: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine relationship between minds? Are disagreements always only temporary steps toward final agreement? Must a community of disagreement always imply agreement, as in an agreement to disagree? What is Talmud? rethinks the task of philological, literary, historical, and cultural analysis of the Talmud. It introduces an aspect of this task that has best been approximated by the philosophical, anthropological, and ontological interrogation of human being in relationship to the Other-whether animal, divine, or human. In both engagement and disengagement with post-Heideggerian traditions of thought, Sergey Dogopolski complements philological-historical and cultural approaches to the Talmud with a rigorous anthropological, ontological, and Talmudic inquiry. He redefines the place of the Talmud and its study, both traditional and academic, in the intellectual map of the West, arguing that Talmud is a scholarly art of its own and represents a fundamental intellectual discipline, not a mere application of logical, grammatical, or even rhetorical arts for the purpose of textual hermeneutics. In Talmudic intellectual art, disagreement is a fundamental category. What Is Talmud? rediscovers disagreement as the ultimate condition of finite human existence or co-existence.Path of the Prophets: The Ethics-Driven Life
By Rabbi Barry L. Schwartz. 1888
Illuminating the ethical legacy of the biblical prophets, Path of the Prophets identifies the prophetic moment in the lives of…
eighteen biblical figures and demonstrates their compelling relevance to us today. While the Bible almost exclusively names men as prophets, Rabbi Barry L. Schwartz celebrates heroic, largely unknown biblical women such as Shiphrah, Tirzah, and Hannah. He also deepens readers’ interpretations of more familiar biblical figures not generally thought of as prophets, such as Joseph, Judah, and Caleb. Schwartz introduces the prophets with creative, first-person retellings of their decisive experiences, followed by key biblical narratives, context, and analysis. He weighs our heroes’ and heroines’ legacies—their obstacles and triumphs—and considers how their ethical examples live on; he guides us on how to integrate biblical-ethical values into our lives; and he challenges each of us to walk the prophetic path today.Joseph: Portraits through the Ages
By Alan T. Levenson. 1988
The complex and dramatic story of Joseph is the most sustained narrative in Genesis. Many call it a literary masterpiece…
and a story of great depth that can be read on many levels. In a lucid and engaging style, Alan T. Levenson brings the voices of Philo, Josephus, Midrash, and medieval commentators, as well as a wide range of modern scholars, into dialogue about this complex biblical figure. Levenson explores such questions as: Why did Joseph’s brothers hate him so? What is achieved by Joseph’s ups and downs on the path to extraordinary success? Why didn’t Joseph tell his father he was alive and ruling Egypt? What was Joseph like as a husband and father? Was Joseph just or cruel in testing his brothers’ characters? Levenson deftly shows how an unbroken chain of interpretive traditions, mainly literary but also artistic, have added to the depth of this fascinating and unique character.Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice: Studies in Tradition and Modernity (A JPS Scholar of Distinction Book #9)
By Rabbi David Ellenson. 1978
Internationally recognized scholar David Ellenson shares twenty-three of his most representative essays, drawing on three decades of scholarship and demonstrating…
the consistency of the intellectual-religious interests that have animated him throughout his lifetime. These essays center on a description and examination of the complex push and pull between Jewish tradition and Western culture. Ellenson addresses gender equality, women’s rights, conversion, issues relating to who is a Jew, the future of the rabbinate, Jewish day schools, and other emerging trends in American Jewish life. As an outspoken advocate for a strong Israel that is faithful to the democratic and Jewish values that informed its founders, he also writes about religious tolerance and pluralism in the Jewish state. The former president of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, the primary seminary of the Reform movement, Ellenson is widely respected for his vision of advancing Jewish unity and of preparing leadership for a contemporary Judaism that balances tradition with the demands of a changing world. Scholars and students of Jewish religious thought, ethics, and modern Jewish history will welcome this erudite collection by one of today’s great Jewish leaders.What Ifs of Jewish History
By Rosenfeld, Gavriel D.. 2016
What if the Exodus had never happened? What if the Jews of Spain had not been expelled in 1492? What…
if Eastern European Jews had never been confined to the Russian Pale of Settlement? What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1939? What if a Jewish state had been established in Uganda instead of Palestine? Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's pioneering anthology examines how these and other counterfactual questions would have affected the course of Jewish history. Featuring essays by sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of Jewish Studies, What Ifs of Jewish History is the first volume to systematically apply counterfactual reasoning to the Jewish past. Written in a variety of narrative styles, ranging from the analytical to the literary, the essays cover three thousand years of dramatic events and invite readers to indulge their imaginations and explore how the course of Jewish history might have been different.Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco
By Jessica M Marglin. 2016
A previously untold story of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco, showing how law facilitated Jews' integration into the broader Moroccan…
society in which they lived Morocco went through immense upheaval in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the experiences of a single Jewish family, Jessica Marglin charts how the law helped Jews to integrate into Muslim society--until colonial reforms abruptly curtailed their legal mobility. Drawing on a broad range of archival documents, Marglin expands our understanding of contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims and changes the way we think about Jewish history, the Middle East, and the nature of legal pluralism.During stressful times, it's easy to get caught up in feeling anxious, tense, foggy, and overloaded. Here, a popular psychologist…
shares easy-to-use techniques for managing and rebalancing these emotions and helps you to find your calm, strong center. Dr. Leonard Felder draws from his work with clients over the last thirty years, and incorporates traditional Jewish prayers and blessings that have been used for centuries to refocus the mind. The author has a long history of multi-faith counseling and dialogue and has made these stress-management practices resonant with people of all religious backgrounds who are looking for more awareness, clarity, and calmness when faced with stress-related emotions. In this book you'll learn how to: * Regain your equilibrium when you feel pulled in too many directions * Outsmart your moody, anxious brain * Know when to intervene and when to let go in a situation * Respond with wisdom when someone treats you harshly * Find inner quiet and peace when you feel agitated * And much more In each chapter, Felder includes examples drawn from his client's experiences and explanations from mind-body psychology and neuroscience to support the effectiveness of this kind of mindfulness practice.Eight Decades: The Selected Writings of W. Gunther Plaut
By Jonathan V Plaut, W Gunther Plaut. 2008
W. Gunther Plaut is one of Reform Judaism’s most acclaimed twentieth century rabbis and scholars. He is a gifted writer…
and intellectual whose ideas garner devotees throughout the world. Eight Decades: The Selected Writings of W. Gunther Plaut is a selection of his previously published articles and essays. They include discussions on history, biblical topics, literature and linguistics, theological questions, moral and social issues, perspectives on Reform Judaism, legal issues, and Israel. First published in magazines as diverse as Maclean’s, Atlantic, Commentary, Reconstructionist, Ontario Medical Review, Hebrew Union College Annual, and many others, each essay carries a unique message that is still relevant today. Eight Decades is a fitting companion to One Voice: The Selected Sermons of W. Gunther Plaut, published in 2007 on the occasion of his ninety-fifth birthday.One Voice: The Selected Sermons of W. Gunther Plaut
By Jonathan V Plaut, W Gunther Plaut. 2008
W. Gunther Plaut is an internationally recognized rabbi and scholar, and one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century.…
He was born in Germany, but in 1935 fled the Nazis for the United States, where he became a rabbi. He served in Chicago and St. Paul, and, from 1961 to 1977 was Senior Rabbi of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. Upon his retirement he was appointed Senior Scholar. Published on the occasion of his ninety-fifth birthday, this collection of sermons delivered over a period of fifty years includes discussions about religion, faith, and God; ethics and values; being a Jew, Reform Judaism, and Israel; and aging and death. Each sermon is as relevant and meaningful today as it was when first delivered. W. Gunther Plaut is an electrifying speaker who held his audiences spellbound with his charisma and wit. This anthology of his sermons is a fitting tribute to the wisdom and spirit of this great man!The Wisdom of Maimonides: The Life and Writings of the Jewish Sage
By Edward Hoffman. 2008
Here is an accessible introduction to the life and wisdom of the famous twelfth-century philosopher-physician Moses Maimonides, whose prolific writings…
on medical and religious issues, commentaries on Jewish texts, and writings on Jewish ethics and law profoundly influenced Judaism.The Wisdom of Maimonides includes a biography; a section of selected teachings drawn from Maimonides' major works The Guide for the Perplexed and the Mishneh Torah, as well as his other writings; and tales about Maimonides' colorful life as a court physician and rabbinic leader.The God-Powered Life: Awakening to Your Divine Purpose
By Rabbi David Aaron. 2009
You are an individual expression of God; that's the teaching of the ancient Jewish mystical tradition. Here Rabbi David Aaron…
shows that when we truly connect to our inner self, that fact becomes wonderfully obvious. Each of us has a divine mission in life, he says, and when we understand this, we are empowered to take control of our life; to use our creative powers more fully; and to give more to others, our community, and the world. In The God-Powered Life, Rabbi Aaron uses Jewish mystical teachings, including the ten Sephirot, or attributes of God, to help us get in touch with our inner selves and find a deeper sense of our own self-worth. In his characteristic warm, witty, and accessible style, Rabbi Aaron helps us find a connection to the divine within ourselves and then shows us how to manifest that divine presence in our dealings with others and during tumultuous times. To learn more about the author, visit his website at www.rabbidavidaaron.com.Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism
By Jay Michaelson. 2009
This exploration of the radical, yet ancient, idea that everything and everyone is God will transform how you understand your…
life and the nature of religion itself. While God is conventionally viewed as an entity separate from us, there are some Jews--Kabbalists, Hasidim, and their modern-day heirs--who assert that God is not separate from us at all. In this nondual view, everyone and everything manifests God. For centuries a closely guarded secret of Kabbalah, nondual Judaism is a radical reorientation of religious life that is increasingly influencing mainstream Judaism today.Writer and scholar Jay Michaelson presents a wide-ranging and compelling explanation of nondual Judaism: what it is, its traditional and contemporary sources, its historical roots and philosophical significance, how it compares to nondual Buddhism and Hinduism, and how it is lived in practice. He explains what this mystical nondual view means in our daily ego-centered lives, for our communities, and for the future of Judaism.Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar
By Alan Morinis. 2007
Mussar is an illuminating, approachable, and highly practical set of teachings for cultivating personal growth and spiritual realization in the…
midst of day-to-day life. Here is an accessible and inspiring introduction to this Jewish spiritual path, which until lately has been best known in the world of Orthodox Judaism. The core teaching of Mussar is that our deepest essence is inherently pure and holy, but this inner radiance is obscured by extremes of emotion, desire, and bad habits. Our work in life is to uncover the brilliant light of the soul. The Mussar masters developed transformative teachings and practices--some of which are contemplative, some of which focus on how we relate to others in daily life--to help us to heal and refine ourselves.To learn more about the author, visit his website: www.mussarinstitute.orgThe Kabbalah Reader: A Sourcebook of Visionary Judaism
By Arthur Kurzweil, Edward Hoffman. 2010
This comprehensive and accessible entrée into the world of Kabbalah covers 1,600 years of Jewish mystical thought and features a…
variety of thinkers--from the renowned to the obscure--unavailable in any other volume. It's a fresh take on an ancient tradition compiled by Edward Hoffman, a psychologist and respected scholar of Judaism, who reveals how this supposedly esoteric material is relevant to a host of contemporary concerns, such as ethics, emotional health, intuition and creativity, meditation, social relations and leadership, and higher states of consciousness. Contributors include: Moses Chaim Luzzatto, Moses Cordovero, Abraham Abulafia, Maimonides, Nachmanides, The Maharal, Nachman of Breslov, The Baal Shem Tov, The Gaon of Vilna, The Netziv, The Ben Ish Chai, Yehudah Ashlag, Kalonymus Shapira, Baba Sali, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, Adin Steinsaltz, Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi, Jonathan Sacks, and many others, along with excerpts from the Sefer Yetzirah, Sefer HaBahir, and Sefer HaZohar.