Jewish Perspectives on the Experience of Suffering

Jewish Perspectives on the Experience of Suffering PDF Author: Shalom Carmy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This collection of essays seeks to understand the tension between contemporary and traditional elements in the thought, practices, and life of Modern Orthodox Jewry. Together, they are a fascinating study of the balance that occurs between modernity and traditionalism, whereby faith and practice emerge from the encounter adapted but not wholly transformed.

Jewish Perspectives on the Experience of Suffering

Jewish Perspectives on the Experience of Suffering PDF Author: Shalom Carmy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This collection of essays seeks to understand the tension between contemporary and traditional elements in the thought, practices, and life of Modern Orthodox Jewry. Together, they are a fascinating study of the balance that occurs between modernity and traditionalism, whereby faith and practice emerge from the encounter adapted but not wholly transformed.

Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy

Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy PDF Author: Oliver Leaman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521427227
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The problems of evil and suffering have been extensively discussed in Jewish philosophy, and much of the discussion has centred on the Book of Job. In this new study Oliver Leaman poses two questions: how can a powerful and caring deity allow terrible things to happen to obviously innocent people, and why has the Jewish people been so harshly treated throughout history, given its status as the chosen people? He explores these issues through an analysis of the views of Philo, Saadya, Maimonides, Gersonides, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and post-Holocaust thinkers, and suggests that a discussion of evil and suffering is really a discussion about our relationship with God. The Book of Job is thus both the point of departure and the point of return.

Suffering Religion

Suffering Religion PDF Author: Robert Gibbs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134501447
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
In a diverse and innovative selection of new essays by cutting-edge theologians and philosophers, Suffering Religion examines one of the most primitive but challenging questions to define human experience - why do we suffer? As a theme uniting very different religious and cultural traditions, the problem of suffering addresses issues of passivity, the vulnerability of embodiment, the generosity of love and the complexity of gendered desire. Interdisciplinary studies bring different kinds of interpretations to meet and enrich each other. Can the notion of goodness retain meaning in the face of real affliction, or is pain itself in conflict with meaning? Themes covered include: *philosophy's own failure to treat suffering seriously, with special reference to the Jewish tradition *Martin Buber's celebrated interpretations of scriptural suffering *suffering in Kristevan psychoanalysis, focusing on the Christian theology of the cross *the pain of childbirth in a home setting as a religiously significant choice *Gods primal suffering in the kabbalistic tradition *Incarnation as a gracious willingness to suffer.

Jewish Suffering

Jewish Suffering PDF Author: Robert Chazan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 46

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Book Description
Early Christianity understood the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.) as the immediate outcome of the Jewish rejection of Jesus, a view later reinforced by the perception of permanent Jewish degradation evident in the continued exile and inferior status of Jews in the societies that hosted them. Aware of this view, Jews of Western Christendom interpreted their suffering in more triumphal ways. Hebrew narratives of the First Crusade (1096) depict the Christian understanding of Crusader attacks on Jewish communities as part of the ongoing degradation of Jews and evidence that they ought to convert to Christianity. Two important Hebrew sources, the Mainz Anonymous and the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, counter this view with the perspective of a glorification of Jewish martyrdom found in the same events. By the mid-thirteenth century, the argument that Jewish suffering was a result of God's rejection of the Jews was paramount to Christian efforts to win over Jews in forced debates and forced sermons - instruments employed by such converts as Friar Paul and Alfonso of Valladolid. Jewish authors, such as Nahmanides (in his famous debate with Friar Paul) and Rabbi Mordechai ben Joseph of Avignon, asserted that Christian claims of divine favor were erroneous, and that God's promise of redemption for Jews was still valid. These methods to resist Christian assertions of superiority and affirm the grandeur of Jewish experience were essential for the continuity of Jewish life in the Middle Ages.

Work, Love, Suffering, Death

Work, Love, Suffering, Death PDF Author: Reuven P. Bulka
Publisher: Jason Aronson
ISBN: 1461632633
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature

Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature PDF Author: David Kraemer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195358422
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The existence of suffering poses an obvious problem for the monotheistic religions. Why does an all-powerful, benevolent God allow humans to suffer? And given that God does, what is the appropriate human response? In modern times Jewish theologians in particular, faced with the enormity of the Holocaust, have struggled to come to grips with these issues. In Responses to Suffering, David Kraemer offers the first comprehensive history of teachings related to suffering in classical rabbinic literature. Beginning with the Mishnah (c. 200 CE), Kraemer examines traditions on suffering, divine justice, national catastrophe, and the like, in all major rabbinic works of late antiquity. Bringing to bear recent methods in the history of religions, literary criticism, canonical criticism, and the sociology of religion, Kraemer offers a rich analysis of the development of attitudes that are central to and remain contemporary concerns of any religious society.

Making Sense of Suffering

Making Sense of Suffering PDF Author: Yitzchok Kirzner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781578197583
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description


Healing and the Jewish Imagination

Healing and the Jewish Imagination PDF Author: Rachel Adler
Publisher: Jewish Lights Publishing
ISBN: 1580233732
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Essential reading for people interested in the Jewish healing, spirituality and spiritual direction movements, this groundbreaking volume explores the Jewish tradition for comfort in times of illness and Judaism?s perspectives on the inevitable suffering with which we live.Pushing the boundaries of Jewish knowledge, scholars, teachers, artists and activists examine the aspects of our mortality and the important distinctions between curing and healing. Topics discussed include: the importance of the individual; health and healing among the mystics; hope and the Hebrew Bible; from disability to enablement; overcoming stigma; Jewish bioethics; and more.Drawing from literature, personal experience, and the foundational texts of Judaism, these celebrated thinkers show us that healing is an idea that can both soften us so that we are open to inspiration as well as toughen us?like good scar tissue?in order to live with the consequences of being human.

The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought

The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought PDF Author: Jason Kalman
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0878201955
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
Despite its general absence from the Jewish liturgical cycle and its limited place in Jewish practice, the Book of Job has permeated Jewish culture over the last 2,000 years. Job has not only had to endure the suffering described in the biblical book, but the efforts of countless commentators, interpreters, and creative rewriters whose explanations more often than not challenged the protagonist's righteousness in order to preserve Divine justice. Beginning with five critical essays on the specific efforts of ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish writers to make sense of the biblical book, this volume concludes with a detailed survey of the place of Job in the Talmud and Midrashic corpus, in medieval biblical commentary, in ethical, mystical, and philosophical tracts, as well as in poetry and creative writing in a wide variety of Jewish languages from around the world from the second to sixteenth centuries.

Believing and Its Tensions

Believing and Its Tensions PDF Author: Neil Gillman
Publisher: Jewish Lights Publishing
ISBN: 1580236693
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
An intimate and candid examination of the changing nature of belief and where it can lead us--from the life experience of one of Judaism's leading thinkers. For over five decades, Rabbi Neil Gillman has helped people think through the most challenging questions at the heart of being a believing religious person. In this intimate rethinking of his own theological journey he explores the changing nature of belief and the complexities of reconciling the intellectual, emotional and moral questions of his own searching mind and soul. If what we have in recognizing, speaking of and experiencing God is a wide-ranging treasury of humanly crafted metaphors, what, then, is the ultimate reality, the ultimate nature of God? What lies beyond the metaphors? If humanity was an active partner in revelation--if the human community participated in what was revealed and gave it meaning--what then should be the authority of Jewish law? How do we cope--intellectually, emotionally and morally--with suffering, the greatest challenge to our faith commitment, relationship with God and sense of a fundamentally ordered world? Death is inevitable but why is it built in as part of the total life experience?