Imagining the Jewish God

(Hardback)

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Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God. This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this booka covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the text as foundational for the imagined people of the book. That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.

Reviews

The Jewish tradition presents God in graphic, anthropomorphic terms and, at the same time, as beyond any description. Secularism and the Holocaust have blinded some of us to the realm of the transcendent altogether, but many others continue to experience the transcendent in both the everyday and the unusual but do not know how to unpack that experience. The editors of Imagining the Jewish Godhave thus wisely chosen to include many of the best minds and hearts and many types of materials, from philosophy to poetry, to help us see the range of Jews' attempt to describe their experience of the transcendent and what that experience means for their lives. -- Elliot Dorff, American Jewish University, author of Knowing God: Jewish Journeys to the Unknowable
There has long been in contemporary Jewish thought a large absence just where, one imagined, God ought to be. This volumes editors and contributors jump bravely into the breach, armed only with classical scholarship, philosophic understanding, literary sensitivity, moral urgency and, before and after all else, imagination. The result is this passionate book, gathering living ideas in mid-flight and words pushed to their limits, marking new traces across that Void. -- Yehudah Mirsky, Brandeis University, author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution

Author Bio

Leonard Kaplan is professor emeritus of law at the University of Wisconsin. Ken Koltun-Fromm is professor of religion at Haverford College.