Man Is Not Alone

Man Is Not Alone is a profound, beautifully written examination of the ingredients of piety: how man senses God’s presence, explores it, accepts it, and builds life upon it. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s philosophy of religion is not a philosophy of doctrine or the interpretation of a dogma. He erects his carefully built structure of thought upon foundations which are universally valid but almost generally ignored. It was Man Is Not Alone which led Reinhold Niebuhr accurately to predict that Heschel would “become a commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America.” With its companion volume, God in Search of Man, it is revered as a classic of modern theology. See details

An Autobiography

An Autobiography . Brilliant and bedraggled, the picaresque Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon was one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century. Now the definitive English version of Maimon’s remarkable Autobiography, the 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, is available for the first time in paperback, enhanced with a new introduction by Jewish studies scholar Michael Shapiro.

Wry and spirited, shrewd and unrepentant, Maimon alternated between nomadic destitution and intellectual swordplay among the Jewish elite of Berlin. The son of a petty merchant in Polish Lithuania, Maimon was a child Talmud prodigy who became increasingly antagonistic toward the Jewish establishment and receptive toward the secular philosophies of Spinoza, Hume, Leibnitz, and Kant.

A perpetual outsider, Maimon observed with an equally sharp eye the excesses of his time and the vicissitudes of his own life. Parallel to his own development as a thinker in the company of Moses Mendelssohn and others, Maimon conveys the physically wretched but spiritually vibrant Polish ghetto, the beginnings of Hasidism (which he denounces as antirationalist), and the world of the wealthy Berlin Jewry who enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment.

Combining philosophical discourse with personal anecdotes that shift abruptly from the tragic to the hilarious and back, Maimon’s Autobiography indelibly portrays one man’s devotion to truth on his own terms regardless of the cost to himself or others. See details

Simple Words: Thinking About What Really Matters in Life

Simple Words: Thinking About What Really Matters in Life . Friends, family, love, God, death, faith. These, and others, are deceptively simple words that we use all the time. Do we know what we mean when we use these important words? Do we know what other people mean when they use them? We seldom pause to reflect on these words or to make sure that we understand them, yet we continue to use them, so we misunderstand others and they misunderstand us.

Adin Steinsaltz examines some of the meanings of these powerful words. He transforms each word into a gem, turning it this way, then that, examining it to see more clearly its brilliant facets and what lies beyond them. He challenges us to think deeply about the connotations of these commonplace words, and in so doing, to see that there may be other ways of looking at things that we have taken for granted in our lives. Simple Words is a thought-provoking — and surprising — adventure that may change the way we think, speak, and act. See details

Persecution and the Art of Writing

Persecution and the Art of Writing is absolutely central within the body of Leo Strauss’s work. It stands as the culmination of his earliest work and the beginning of his middle phase of work (which most readers and commentators seem to focus on).

Leo Strauss started his philosophical career directly confronted with what he would come to call the “theological-political problem”. As a Jewish intellectual in during the Weimer years, he found himself confronted with the ways that liberal political philosophy had failed the Jewish people. That confrontation led him from an exploration of different forms of Zionism to the roots of the Enlightenment critique of revelation in Spinoza and Hobbes and back to (what Strauss called) the Medieval Enlightenment works of Maimonides, Farabi and Halevi. Particularly in the writing of Maimonides and Farabi (but also in the writings of Lessing), Strauss found the clues that led him to his theory of esoteric and exoteric writing.

When talking about this Straussian way of reading, the first thing to emphasize is that it is not a universal hermeneutic. Strauss is not saying that all philosophy or theological books were written with an esoteric component. He is saying that some were and that there are indications that can be used to detect when a book is so written.

Before we get to that, let’s consider THE basic presumption of Strauss’s- that there are two types of men, philosophers and non-philosophers. And the two are motivated fundamentally differently and are capable of fundamentally different lives. Furthermore, it is important to realize that what Strauss believes is going on in an esoteric text is that one philosopher is writing in such a way that other philosophers can discern his hidden meaning.

Why would someone do this? This is also key. Strauss feels that since the mid-1900s in most Western cultures that it has not been necessary to write this way. In fact, as a culture, we have forgotten that this was necessary. The radical Enlightenment determined that all truths must be told to all humanity and we have come to accept that. See details

A Code of Jewish Ethics: Volume 1: You Shall Be Holy

A Code of Jewish Ethics, Volume 1: You Shall Be Holy is the initial volume of the first major code of Jewish ethics to be written in the English language. It is a monumental work on the vital topic of personal character and integrity by one of the premier Jewish scholars and thinkers of our time.

With the stated purpose of restoring ethics to its central role in Judaism, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin offers hundreds of examples from the Torah, the Talmud, rabbinic commentaries, and contemporary stories to illustrate how ethical teachings can affect our daily behavior. The subjects dealt with are ones we all encounter. They include judging other people fairly; knowing when forgiveness is obligatory, optional, or forbidden; balancing humility and self-esteem; avoiding speech that shames others; restraining our impulses of envy, hatred, and revenge; valuing truth but knowing when lying is permitted; understanding why God is the ultimate basis of morality; and appreciating the great benefits of Torah study. Telushkin has arranged the book in the traditional style of Jewish codes, with topical chapters and numbered paragraphs. Statements of law are almost invariably followed by anecdotes illustrating how these principles have been, or can be, practiced in daily life. The book can be read straight through to provide a solid grounding in Jewish values, consulted as a reference when facing ethical dilemmas, or studied in a group.

Vast in scope, this volume distills more than three thousand years of Jewish laws and suggestions on how to improve one’s character and become more honest, decent, and just. It is a landmark work of scholarship that is sure to influence the lives of Jews for generations to come, rich with questions to ponder and discuss, but primarily a book to live by. See details

Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Johns Hopkins Jewish Studies)

Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. “Insofar as these confessional writings continue to a certain extent Levinas’s meditations on the face, they are considered essential to a serious appraisal of his work as a whole. But there are additional reasons why these writings are of substantial interest. First, they make explicit a dimension in Levinas’s work — its inspiration in or reference to Judaism — that is only implicit in the philosophical work… Secondly, these confessional writings in themselves constitute a remarkable access to and ‘translation’ of Judaism.” — MLN. See details