scholarly journals The Love of God as a Consistent Jewish Response to Modernity

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 324
Author(s):  
Erik Dreff
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Modern Jewish Thought

Discussions of Jewish responses to modernity often focus on what is new or what has adapted or evolved in Judaism in the face of modernity’s challenges. However, contrary to convention, this paper argues that, at least in principle, neither has the challenge nor the response changed all that much. Through an examination of several key modern Jewish thinkers, including Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Buber, and by focusing on a traditional Jewish concept and value, the Love of God, this paper claims that the Love of God functions as the orienting principle for much of modern Jewish thought, just as it did throughout the history of Judaism. Upon demonstrating the consistent presence of the concept of the Love of God throughout the Jewish tradition, and especially in much of modern Jewish thought, this paper goes on to briefly reflect on the importance and vitality of the concept of the Love of God for both Judaism and modernity, despite and beyond the commercialization and cheapening of the concept of Love in recent times.

scholarly journals Marranism as Judaism as Universalism: Reconsidering Spinoza

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Daniel Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Potential Source ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socially Situated ◽  
Modern Jewish Thought

This essay seeks to reconsider the relation of the universal-rational ethos of Spinoza’s thought to the Jewish tradition and culture in which he was raised and socially situated. In particular, I seek to engage with two previous portrayals—specifically, those of Isaac Deutscher and Yirmiyahu Yovel—that present Spinoza’s universalism as arising from his break from or transcendence of Judaism, where the latter is cast primarily (along with Christianity) as a historical-particular and therefore non-universal tradition. In seeking a potential source of Spinoza’s orientation, Yovel points Marrano culture, as a sub-group that was already alienated from both mainstream Judaism and mainstream Christianity. By contrast, I argue that there are key elements of pre-Spinoza Jewish-rabbinic conceptuality and material culture that already enact a profoundly universalist ethos, specifically in contrast to more parochialist or particularist ethical dynamics prevalent in the culture of Christendom at the time. We will see, furthermore, that the Marrano dynamics that Yovel fruitfully highlights in fact have much in common with dynamics that were already in place in non-Marrano Jewish tradition and culture. As such, we will see that Spinoza’s thought can be understood not only as manifesting a Marrano-like dynamic in the context of rational-philosophical discourse, but also as preserving a not dissimilar Jewish-rabbinic dynamic at the same time. This, in turn, will point to new possibilities for tracing this latter dynamic through the subsequent history of modern philosophy and modern Jewish thought.

Holiness in Jewish Thought

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Life

Holiness is a challenge for contemporary Jewish thought. The concept of holiness is crucial to religious discourse in general and to Jewish discourse in particular. “Holiness” seems to express an important feature of religious thought and of religious ways of life. Yet the concept is ill defined. This collection explores what concepts of holiness were operative in different periods of Jewish history and bodies of Jewish literature. It offers preliminary reflections on their theological and philosophical import today. The contributors illumine some of the major episodes concerning holiness in the history of the development of the Jewish tradition. They think about the problems and potential implicit in Judaic concepts of holiness, to make them explicit, and to try to retrieve the concepts for contemporary theological and philosophical reflection. Holiness is elusive but it need not be opaque. This volume makes Jewish concepts of holiness lucid, accessible, and intellectually engaging.

Pragmatism and Jewish Thought: Eliezer Berkovits’s Philosophy of Halakhic Fallibility

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-135
Author(s):  
Nadav Berman Shifman
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Ongoing Effort ◽  
History Of

Abstract In classical American pragmatism, fallibilism refers to the conception of truth as an ongoing process of improving human knowledge that is nevertheless susceptible to error. This paper traces appearances of fallibilism in Jewish thought in general, and particularly in the halakhic thought of Eliezer Berkovits. Berkovits recognizes the human condition’s persistent mutability, which he sees as characterizing the ongoing effort to interpret and apply halakhah in shifting historical and social contexts as Torat Ḥayyim. In the conclusion of the article, broader questions and observations are raised regarding Jewish tradition, fallibility, and modernity, and the interaction between Judaism and pragmatism in the history of ideas.

Is it Possible to Write a History of Jewish Thought?

2003 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-300
Author(s):  
Dov Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
Modern Jewish Thought

AbstractIn the past few years, traditional scholars and would-be innovators have been locked in controversy over the scholarly study of Qabbalah. The field of Jewish philosophical thought, however, has witnessed no such upheavals. This is not to say that no progress has been made: Texts are being rescued from oblivion; philosophical systems are constantly under review. However, little work has been done in the direction of a new scholarly awareness of the history of Jewish thought wholly outside the area of mysticism. This situation is clearly mirrored in various attempts to write and document the history of Jewish philosophy. In what follows I describe various aspects of current efforts to write the history of ideas in the area of medieval and modern Jewish thought and speculate on what might have been. Without intending to exhaust the topic of the historiography of Jewish ideas, I would like to propose some new goals for future research into Jewish rationalism.

Freud and Jewish Dreaming

2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Frosh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Biblical Figures

This paper describes some links between Freud's creative activity in The Interpretation of Dreams and his identification with the biblical figures of Joseph and Moses. In particular, it draws on traditional Jewish thought on the relationship between prophecy and dreaming, and on the characters of Joseph and of Moses. It is argued that The Interpretation of Dreams shows Freud exploring aspects of his gendered and cultural identity and finding a place for himself as a provocative and iconoclastic ‘dreamer’ in the Jewish tradition.

Mimetic Monsters

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Edge Of Chaos ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship

This article reads between two recent explorations of the relationship between religion, chaos, and the monstrous: Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and Author's Religion and Its Monsters. Both are oriented toward the edge of chaos and order; both see the primordial and chaotic as generative; both pursue monstrous mythological figures as divine personifications of primordial chaos; both find a deep theological ambivalences in Christian and Jewish tradition with regard to the monstrous, chaotic divine; both are critical of theological and cultural tendencies to demonize chaos and the monstrous; and finally, both read the divine speech from the whirlwind in the book of Job as a revelation of divine chaos. But whereas one sees it as a call for laughter, a chaotic life-affirming laughter with Leviathan in the face of the deep, the other sees it as an incarnation of theological horror, leaving Job and the reader overwhelmed and out-monstered by God. Must it be one way or the other? Can laughter and horror coincide in the face of the deep?

Luxury Communist Jesus

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sandford
Keyword(s):  
Work Ethic ◽  
Protestant Work Ethic ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Protestant Work Ethic

This article begins by outlining contemporary anti-work politics, which form the basis of Sandford’s reading. After providing a brief history of anti-work politics, Sandford examines recent scholarly treatments of Jesus’ relationship to work. An examination of a number of texts across the gospel traditions leads Sandford to argue that Jesus can be read as a ‘luxury communist’ whose behaviour flies in the face of the Protestant work ethic. Ultimately, Sandford foregrounds those texts in which Jesus discourages his followers from working, and undermines work as an ‘end in itself’, contextualising these statements in relation to other gospel texts about asceticism and the redistribution of wealth.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

Can an Adulteress Save Jesus? the Pericope Adulterae, Feminist Interpretation, and the Limits of Narrative Agency

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Knust
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Feminist Interpretation ◽  
Narrative Agency ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

The pericope adulterae (John 7:53–8:11) is often interpreted as an inherently feminist story, one that validates women’s humanity in the face of a patriarchal order determined to reduce sexual sinners and women more generally to the status of object. Reading this story within a framework of queer narratology, however, leads to a different point of view, one that challenges the consequences of seeking rescue from a god and a text that are both quite willing to forge male homosocial bonds at a woman’s expense. As the history of this story also shows, texts and their meanings remain unsettled and therefore open to further unpredictable and contingent elaboration. Pondering my own feminist commitments, I attempt to imagine a world and a story where a woman is a person and Jesus is in need of rescue. Perhaps such a world is possible. Or perhaps it is not.

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