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Yochanan Muffs
The Personhood of God
2008 Hebrew
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In accessible terms and with startling insights, renowned Bible scholar Dr. Yochanan Muffs examines the anthropomorphic evolution of the Divine Image – from creator of the cosmos to God the father, the husband, the king, the ultimate master – and how these different images of God have shaped our faith and world view. Muffs also examines how expressions of divine power, divine will and divine love throughout the Bible have helped develop the contemporary human condition and our enriching dialectic between faith and doubt.
Click here to see a TV interview with Hartman Institute`s Moshe Halbertal about this book.
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Michael Walzer
Menachem Lorberbaum
Noam Zohar
Yair Lorberbaum
The Jewish Political Tradition. Volume 1: Authority
2008 Hebrew
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This book launches a landmark four-volume collaborative work exploring the political thought of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present. The texts and commentaries in Volume I address the basic question of who ought to rule the community. The contributors – philosophers, lawyers, political theorists, and other Jewish studies scholars – discuss the authority of God, the claims of kings, priests, prophets, rabbis, lay leaders, and Gentile rulers during the years of the exile, and issues of authority in the modern state of Israel. Click here to read an in-depth interview with the book`s editors.
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Moshe Halbertal
By Way of Truth: Nahmanides and the Creation of Tradition
2006 Hebrew
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Nahmanides, the Jewish legal giant of the 13th century, was also one of the most creative and incisive biblical interpreters and kabbalists that ever existed in the Jewish world, spreading kabbalistic hints that he called "by way of truth" within his writings. This book provides a systematic and broad picture of Nahmanide`s work, encompassing his halachic outlook, his approach to central topics in Jewish thought of the Middle Ages and the secret realm.
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David Hartman
Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Josef B. Soloveitchik
2006 Hebrew
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Rabbi Josef B. Soloveitchik deeply influenced Jewish modern orthodoxy in the United States – and Judaism in general – in creating a dialogue between traditional Torah learning and western philosophical thought. Prof. David Hartman examines anew the focus points of Rabbi Soloveitchik`s philosophy that touch on the central aspects of the lives of modern believers. Hartman locates in these aspects the motivations, tensions and nourishment in Soloveitchik`s philosophy, also exploring its limits and raising new questions regarding this philosophy and modern Jewish thought.
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Menachem Lorberbaum
Politics and the Limits of Law
2006 Hebrew
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Can Jewish law organize a society? What is the relationship between rabbis and community and between Jewish law and the Jewish state? This book examines the attitudes to these questions of the legal giants in Spain of the Middle Ages: Maimonidies, Nahmanides and others. Lorberbaum claims that these legal giants firmly believed that as a legal system Jewish law does not as have the appropriate tools to organize political society. These limits of Jewish law explain the necessity of Israeli political rule for ensuring the existence of a Jewish society loyal to Jewish law.
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Zvi Mark
Mysticism and Madness in the Work of R. Nahman of Bratslav
2003 Hebrew
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About 200 years after R. Nachman of Bratslav’s demise, his philosophical writings and literary creation remain lively and provocative materials. Something of R. Nachman`s magic and magnetic force are illuminated in this research, which presents the Bratslavian mysticism as a unique link in the history of Jewish mysticism. The mystical worldview is the axis of this book, but its branches stretch out to key issues in the Bratslavian world such as belief and imagination, dreams and the land of Israel, melodies and song
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Avi Sagi
The Jewish-Israeli Voyage: Questions of Identity and Culture
2003 Hebrew
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For over a century the Jewish society in Israel has struggled with the basic questions of its identity and culture, navigating the opposition between and the complement of the emerging Israeli ethos and the various ethoses of the Jew that have been consolidated over generations. This book aims to analyze anew the foundations that shaped and continue to shape the Jewish-Israeli discourse. This work analyzes the problems and traps of Israeli cultural discourse and offers alternative ways of communication.
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David Ohana
Neither Canaanites Nor Crusaders
2008 Hebrew
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Neither Canaanites nor Crusaders presents pioneering research that seeks to decipher the “mythical order” of the Israeli “community of common experience.” The two most daring readings of Israeli national essence were the Canaanite narrative and the crusader narrative. The 1920’s Cannanite movement advocated the abrogation of the Jewish religious tradition and the adoption of a “Hebraic Identity” based on a pan-Mesopotamian culture steeped in ancient Semitic heroic myths. The mythological structure of Zionism as a modern crusade described Israeli national essence as a Western colonial project destined to inanity. This book offers an original perspective that follows the development of the Israeli consciousness, describes deep structures and collective mental states, and contextualizes “Israeliness” by time and place.
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Avi Sagi
Yedidya Stern
Herzl Then and Now: An Ancient Jew, a New Man (Vol. 1)
2008 Hebrew
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Benjamin Zeev Herzl claimed that releasing the Jew from the chains of the ancient Jewish identity would enable him to rebuild his life as a new, free and autonomous man who could shape his own destiny. This stood in contrast to the “ancient ” Jew, whose destiny was shaped by others. He strove to bequeath to his “ancient ” nation the enlightenment, modernization and technology developing at the turn of 19th century Europe. This book inspects whether the dramatic installments in the 20th century Jewish journey - exile, the Holocaust, revival and sovereignty – prove that Herzl was correct. Herzl ’s philosophy and his enigmatic personality are examined by some of Israel`s finest researchers in an effort to check whether the choice between the “new man ” and the “ancient Jew ” is necessary, and whether it is feasible to integrate these two possibilities in our private and public lives.
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Avi Sagi
Yedidya Stern
The Jewish State in the Jewish State: Herzl’s World in Contemporary Perspectives (Vol. 2)
2008 Hebrew
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Benjamin Zeev Herzl wrote the utopian “Altneuland,” about which he determined, “If you will it, it is no dream,” and described the principles of the state he dreamed about in his book “The Jewish State”. And yet, in the actual Jewish State, is the utopian realized or does it remain in the realm of a literary legend? This book`s articles deal with the gap between the Herzlian hope and the Israeli existence as it takes expression in different aspects of public life: education, law, welfare, privatization, employment and peoplehood. Some of Israel`s top researchers examine the fascinating intersection of dream and reality, examining through Herzl’s eyes the Israeli reality as it struggles with difficult decisions, and examining through their own Israeli eyes the Herzlian utopia.
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Asher Cohen
Non-Jewish Jews in Israel
2006 Hebrew
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The 300 000 immigrants from the Former Soviet Union who are not Jewish according to Jewish law fundamentally changed the famous, "Who is a Jew?" question. This book describes the integration process of these immigrants by way of "sociological conversion." Cohen`s book presents the many obstructions preventing the transformation of the non-Jewish Jews into Jews proper, and offers policy lines for dealing with this identity challenge.
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Yossi Klein Halevi
At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew`s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land
2006 Hebrew
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"At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden" describes the unprecedented journey by a religiously observant Israeli Jew into the closed worlds of Christianity and Islam in Israel and the territories. For more than a year, following the Christian and Muslim sacred holidays, Yossi Klein Halevi attempted to discover whether religious people of different faiths could experience something of God`s presence together in this land.
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Gili Zivan
Religion without Illusion: An Inquiry into the Thought of Soleveitchick, Leibowitz, Goldman and Hartman
2005 Hebrew
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Religion without Illusion tests the insights and the practicalities of religious Judaism in relation to postmodernism. The first part of the book discusses post-modern thought, while the second part examines the religious philosophies of R. Soleveitchik, Prof. Leibowitz, Prof. Goldman and R. Prof. David Hartman. A consideration of these thinkers` philosophies reveals a Judaism that shies away from any human attempt to understand reality from a divine viewpoint.
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Bernard Susser
Charles S. Liebman
Choosing Survival: Strategies for a Jewish Future
2005 Hebrew
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Suffering has always been a central ingredient in the self understanding of the Jewish nation and its identity. The decline of real Jewish suffering raises a series of questions regarding the survival of the Jewish nation and Jewish identity. The authors deal bravely and originally with these questions, studying and critiquing both the Jewish-Israeli reality and American Jewry. This book examines strategies to halt this process of erosion in both Israel and in the USA and even to bring about a revival in Jewish tradition and identity.
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Avi Sagi
A Challenge: Returning to Tradition
2003 Hebrew
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This book attempts to analyze anew the notion of tradition and its manifestations in the Jewish experience. Sagi challenges the classical view of tradition as comprising a complete submission to the past, a lack of dynamism and life and no reflective criticism, claiming that this image is but a new modernist myth created in order to eliminate tradition from modern existence. The book, carrying out a dialogue with contemporary Jewish thinkers, reveals the dynamic, open and critical character of tradition, revealing it as a continuous dialogue between the past and present that recognizes the complexity of human life.
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Yona Hadari
Messiah Rides a Tank: Public Thought Between the Sinai Campaign and the Yom Kippur War 1955-1975
2002 Hebrew
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At three central junctures from 1955 to 1975 - the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur war – Israeli authors and poets reflect a society sunk in depression in the pre-war periods, but, together with the soldiers, rescue the society from its depression to heights of ecstasy in the war years. In this book, religiosity melds with the fighting military spirit and forms a Jewish identity that is not messianic in reality but in word
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Moshe Halbertal
Donniel Hartman
Judaism and the Challenges of Modern Life
2007 English
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This collection of essays, authored by scholars of the Shalom Hartman Institute, addresses three critical challenges posed to Judaism by modernity - the challenge of ideas, the challenge of diversity, and the challenge of statehood - and provides insights and ideas for the future direction of Judaism.
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Avi Sagi
Zvi Zohar
Transforming Identity: The Ritual Transition from Gentile to Jew – Structure and Meaning
2007 English
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Of all Judaic rituals, that of giyyur (conversion) is arguably the most radical: it irrevocably turns a Gentile into a Jew. The very possibility of such a transformation is anomalous, according to Jewish tradition, which regards Jewishness as an ascriptive status entered through birth to a Jewish mother. This book provides a close reading of primary halakhic texts as a key to the explication of meaning within the Judaic tradition.
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Moshe Idel
Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism
2007 English
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Winner of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award. This book constitutes the first attempt to address the category of Sonship in Jewish mystical literature as a whole – a category more vast than ever imagined. By this survey, not only can the mystical forms of Sonship in Judaism be understood better, but the concept of Sonship in religion in general can also be enriched.
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Donniel Hartman
The Boundaries of Judaism
2007 English
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The factionalism and denominationalism of modern Jewry makes it supremely difficult to create a definition of the Jewish people. This book aims to take readers beyond the divisions that characterize modern Jewry, and explores the ever contentious question, "Who is a Jew."
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Avi Sagi
The Open Canon: On the Meaning of Halakhic Discourse
2007 English
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In this groundbreaking study, Avi Sagi outlines a broad spectrum of answers to important questions presented in Jewish literature, covering theological issues bearing on the meaning of the Torah and of revelation, as well as hermeneutical questions regarding understanding of the halakhic text.
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