Ingram Publisher Services UK

Publication date:

09 September 2016

Length of book:

574 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498517492

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 book—a 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.

I. Prologue: Inscription
1. A Conversation about God, Norman Finkelstein and Michael Heller
2. Seeing Divine Writing: Thoughts on the Drama of the Outside within the Technology of Inscription, Lewis Freedman
3. Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin

II. Out of Levant: Biblical and Rabbinic Imaginings of God
4. Classical Jewish Ethics and Theology in the Halakhic Tractates of the Mishnah, Jonathan Wyn Schofer
5. What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach us About God, Kenneth Seeskin
6. The Bible as Torah: How J, E, P and D Can Teach Us About God, Benjamin Sommer
7. Job: A Fragmented Genealogy, Leonard Kaplan
8. Two Endings, Three Openings, Alicia Ostriker

III. Clinging to God: The Jewish Theological Imagination
9. The Repersonalization of God: Monism and Theological Polymorphism in Zoharic and Hasidic Imagination, Jay Michaelson
10.The Word of God is No Word At All: Intimacy and the Nothingness of God, Shaul Magid
11. Who is God?, Lenn Goodman
12. Jewish Theology and the Transcendental Turn, Randi Rashkover
13. The Perils of Covenant Theology: The Cases of David Hartman and David Novak, Martin Kavka
14. Freud’s Imagining God, David Novak

IV. Inscription: God in Jewish Literature and Culture
15. God of Language, Michael Marmur
16. Location, Location, Location: Toward a Theology of Prepositions, Rebecca Alpert
17. Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God, Noam Reisner
18. Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d, Elissa J. Sampson
19. ‘Don’t Forget the Potatoes’: Imagining God Through Food, Susan Handelman
20. Imagining the Jewish God in Comics, Ken Koltun-Fromm

V. Poetics: God in Language
21. God’s Inside/The Line of a Poem—A Philosophical Commentary, Zachary Braiterman
22. Reconciling God, Revisioning Prayer, and Reaching into the Spaces Between in Selected Works by Alicia Ostriker, Marcia Falk, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Alison Creighton
23. Select Poetry, Charles Bernstein
24. Select Poetry and Commentary, Laynie Browne
25. Select Poetry, Clive Meachen
26. Select Poetry and Commentary, Howard Schwartz
27. Select Poetry and Commentary, Rachel Blau DuPlessis
28. Select Poetry, Bill Sherman
29. Select Poetry, David Weisstub
30. Select Poetry, James Chapson
31. Select Poetry, Jack Hirschman
32. Selections from The Days Between, Marcia Falk
33. Select Poetry and Prose, Jeff Friedman
34. Select Poetry, Gerald Stern
35. Select Poetry, Michael Castro
36. Select Poetry and Commentary, Jerry Rothenberg
37. Select Poetry, Alicia Ostriker

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 God have 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.

Imagining the Jewish God

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ISBN-13: 9781498517492

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