This essay is a close examination of one of Nahman of Bratslav's early and largely unexamined texts, Sefer ha‐Middot. The question it addresses is whether one can call this a study of “ethics” or, in Jewish nomenclature, musar, a work that seeks to cultivate human behaviors and describe ethical formation. In addition, it asks whether Sefer ha‐Middot can be called a text of “virtue ethics” given its focus on virtues and their enactment. The essay argues that Nahman's peculiar metaphysical notion (...) that all mitzvot are inextricably intertwined prevents any analysis of behavioral causality severing his “ethics” from any Aristotelian or Kantian tradition and brings him closer to Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of ethics as tied to traditional norms. And even with MacIntyre, the comparison is quite limited. Discussing “faith,” the “zaddik,” and “money,” the essay explores Nahman's view of how these and other virtues are cultivated and achieved. (shrink)

Postliberal theology has been a topic of considerable theological debate over the past few decades. In his 2011 book Another Reformation, Peter Ochs deploys a postliberal theological model for the purpose of developing a sophisticated understanding of the future of interreligious relations. Ochs argues that postliberal theology is a reparative theology focusing on alleviating human suffering. He argues that the Christian idea of supersessionism may be the most challenging for Christians to confront as they explore avenues for making interreligious dialogue (...) more effective. Ochs critiques the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder's understanding of Zionism as Jewish Constantianism for being an instance of an ostensibly postliberal theology losing its way. In this essay, I offer a critique of Ochs's reading of Yoder, claiming that Yoder's view actually mirrors an important intra-Jewish debate about the relationship between political power and piety, and retrieves an ingenious contribution of both early Judaism and early Christianity that is effaced in today's growing Constantinian approach to Christian imperialism and Jewish nationalism. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 36 - 58 This essay explores Martin Buber’s rendering of Jesus and the Ba‘al Shem Tov as two exemplars of religious anarchism that create a lens through which to see the symmetry between Judaism and Christianity. The essay argues that Buber’s use of Jesus to construct his view of the Ba‘al Shem Tov enables us to revisit the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity through the category of the religious anarchist.

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia examines the life choices of two Jews who loved Christianity. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, born into an ultra-Orthodox, nineteenth-century rabbinic dynasty in Lithuania, spent much of his life writing a Hebrew commentary on the Gospels in order to document and argue for the symmetry or symbiosis that he perceived between Judaism and Christianity. Oswald Rufeisen, from a twentieth-century secular Zionist background in Poland, converted to Catholicism during World War II, became a monk, (...) and attempted to immigrate to Israel as a Jew in 1958. Rufeisen, while permitted to move to Israel to join a Carmelite monastery in Haifa, was denied the right to immediate citizenship of Israel which the Law of Return guarantees to all bona fide Jews. And this particular Soloveitchik has largely been forgotten, given the limits of Jewish interest in the New Testament and of Christian attention to rabbinic literature. This article explores the complex and vexing questions that the careers of these two men raise about the elusive distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and, on the other, between the Jewish religion and Jewish national identity. (shrink)

In this response to the essays in the symposium on my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical I tried to clarify and expand some of the thoughtful and astute themes in the remarks of my interlocutors, especially about how the book was not intended to be about one figure but rather an intervention into postwar American and Israeli Judaism through the lens of a maligned figure who is ignored by most American Jews (...) and demonized by most Israeli Jews. Meir Kahane remains present because he never went away. And he never went away because he offered solutions that, while unpopular and egregious, continue to resonate when Jews begin to feel unstable about their place in America or Israel. He is the dark underside of the modern Jewish project that will not go away. (shrink)