Independent Reasoning in Law: The Jewish Tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-126
Author(s):  
Joseph E. David
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Tradition

JEWISH UNITY IN JEWISH TRADITION

2001 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 80-87
Author(s):  
Alvin Schiff
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Tradition

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?

Persons Together

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Market Relations ◽  
The Image Of God

This chapter moves into the political and economic aspects of human nature. Given scarcity and interdependence, what sense has Judaism made of the material well-being necessary for human flourishing? What are Jewish attitudes toward prosperity, market relations, labor, and leisure? What has Judaism had to say about the political dimensions of human nature? If all humans are made in the image of God, what does that original equality imply for political order, authority, and justice? In what kinds of systems can human beings best flourish? It argues that Jewish tradition shows that we act in conformity with our nature when we elevate, improve, and sanctify it. As co-creators of the world with God, we are not just the sport of our biochemistry. We are persons who can select and choose among the traits that comprise our very own natures, cultivating some and weeding out others.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Western Civilization

This introductory chapter first considers the concept of human nature, raising questions such as how human nature and nature as such are related, and how are both related to person. It then turns to what the Jewish tradition says about human nature. It sets out the book's focus, namely a dialogue between contemporary perspectives and traditional Jewish thoughts on human nature. Both sides have something to gain from the dialogue; both have something to lose from shunning it. Judaism risks intellectual irrelevance by failing to engage with the challenges of contemporary thought. Contemporary thought risks attenuating its moral seriousness if it ignores one of the sources of Western civilization. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The World ◽  
Jewish Writers

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

Paul and the Non-Ethnic Ethnē

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adi Ophir ◽  
Ishay Rosen-Zvi
Keyword(s):  
Political Context ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
Discursive Formation

Chapter 5 singles out one author, the apostle Paul, who offers a novel understanding of the biblical goyim. The chapter goes against the scholarly consensus, according to which Paul simply borrowed his binary distinction between Jews and ethnē from a Jewish tradition. It shows that despite scattered cases in 1 and 2 Maccabees, in which goy is used to refer to indefinite groups of individuals, no such tradition existed. While these texts still preserve the political context of the biblical ethnē, Paul’s ethnē is totally individualized, stripped from any ethnic context. Thus, in Paul’s writing, one finds the first systematic use of a generalized, abstract category of the Jew’s Other. The chapter explains what could have led Paul to develop this discursive formation and discusses the implications. It also considers various ideas about Jews’ others in nascent Christianity and compares them to the rabbinic formation of the goy.

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.

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