The Book of Abraham - an attempt to rationalize Judaism. The Six Enneads by Plotinus. A Rationalist Approach to Suffering. February 17, 2012 Julie Blattberg When Jews search for texts that give meaning to suffering and address healing in the midst of physical, spiritual, and psychic pain, we commonly seek answers in the traditional texts of Torah, Talmud, and Eastern European Jewish spiritual writings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Medieval Jewish philosophical sources, however, are mostly overlooked, perhaps because they never achieved the same popular currency in the Ashkenazic Diaspora. This is a mistake, however, because medieval writings offer important lessons about the nature of loss and its counterpart, healing. Suffering and healing, for the medieval Jewish philosopher, take place in the context of a close interrelationship between the physical and the spiritual, the material and eternal.
The advice that Maimonides and others offer to medieval Jewish communities does not come down to us in a form that we would now normally recognize as nurturing or comforting. What does Maimonides mean? Still Perplexed - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Prophet's Prophet. Heschel aimed, through his writing and teaching, to shock modern people out of complacency and into a spiritual dimension The following article is reprinted from Jewish People, Jewish Thought, published by Prentice-Hall. His Life Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), a descendant of two important Hasidic dynasties, was born in Warsaw. We Also Recommend After receiving a thorough Jewish education in Poland, Heschel entered the University of Berlin, where in 1934 he received his doctorate for a study of the biblical prophets… . In 1937 Heschel became Martin Buber’s successor at the Judisches Lehrhaus in Frankfort and head of adult Jewish education in Germany, but the following year, he and other Polish Jews were deported by the Nazis.
[Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a German-Jewish social and religious philosopher. After stays in Warsaw and London, in 1940 he came to the United States to teach at the Hebrew Union College. A Unique and Vivid Style Did you like this article? Shabbat as a Sanctuary in Time. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals, the Jewish equivalent of sacred architecture. Reprinted with permission from The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, published by Noonday Press. Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. We Also Recommend Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, quality-less, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time.
There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year. Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time. Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today.
Paradoxical Truth. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Professor Greene is lecturing. Down the hall, her arch-rival, Professor Browne, is also lecturing. Professor Greene is holding forth at length about how absurd Professor Browne’s ideas are. She believes Professor Browne to be lecturing in Room 33. Everything written on the board in Room 33 is false. But Professor Greene has made a mistake. Philosophers and logicians love paradoxes, and this is one — one of the many versions of what is usually called the Liar Paradox, discovered by the ancient Greek philosopher Eubulides (4th century B.C.). Paradoxes are apparently good arguments that lead to conclusions that are beyond belief (Greek: “para” = beyond, “doxa” = belief). Both responses are possible. This appears to show that there are exactly the same number of even numbers as whole numbers. This paradox was known to the medievals, and to Galileo.