Thinking about Good and Evil
Jewish Views from Antiquity to Modernity
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- 269,00 kr
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- 269,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
2022 Top Five Reference Book from Academy of Parish Clergy
The most comprehensive book on the topic, Thinking about Good and Evil traces the most salient Jewish ideas about why innocent people seem to suffer, why evil individuals seem to prosper, and God’s role in such matters of (in)justice, from antiquity to the present.
Starting with the Bible and Apocrypha, Rabbi Wayne Allen takes us through the Talmud; medieval Jewish philosophers and Jewish mystical sources; the Ba’al Shem Tov and his disciples; early modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Luzzatto; and, finally, modern thinkers such as Cohen, Buber, Kaplan, and Plaskow. Each chapter analyzes individual thinkers’ arguments and synthesizes their collective ideas on the nature of good and evil and questions of justice. Allen also exposes vastly divergent Jewish thinking about the Holocaust: traditionalist (e.g., Ehrenreich), revisionist (e.g., Rubenstein, Jonas), and deflective (e.g., Soloveitchik, Wiesel).
Rabbi Allen’s engaging, accessible volume illuminates well-known, obscure, and novel Jewish solutions to the problem of good and evil.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rabbi Allen (Perspectives on Jewish Law and Contemporary Issues) examines Jewish responses to the question of why God allows evil to exist and innocents to suffer in this illuminating analysis. By surveying writers from rabbinic times to the present—among them Baruch Spinoza and Neil Gillman, as well as obscure-but-important philosophers Samuel Alexander and Martha Nussbaum—Allen produces a nuanced, vital exploration. For instance, Spinoza found the question of innocent suffering to be "an absurdity" because he believed God and the laws of nature to be the same; and for Nussbaum, God is not a "transcendent being" judging from on high, but "the scaffold supporting the moral basis of life that allows humans to become dignified beings." Impressively—after listing the 35 Jewish answers to why evil exists and the 22 reasons given for suffering—Allen offers a new perspective: that while God is beneficent and omnipotent, God is not omniscient and therefore unaware that some evils exist. Allen's work as a congregational rabbi enables him to imbue this sophisticated yet accessible guide with heartfelt emotion. This remarkable guide will be of interest to any Jewish reader contemplating God's role in suffering. (May)
