James A Diamond

This chapter responds to the Holocaust, the greatest challenge to any contemporary Jewish philosophical theology. Any Jewish theology that continues to insist on theodicy in the shadow of such an exhaustive obliteration of humanity and the divine Presence, or of any traces of godliness in the world, remains incomplete or worse an utter failure. The two most profound thinkers confronting the challenge are Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (1889–1943), the Piaseczner Rebbe, and Emil Fackenheim, the philosopher most known for his view of the Holocaust as a rupture in civilization and thought. The former, whose collection of sermons were delivered and transcribed in the Warsaw Ghetto, buried, and retrieved after the war, is placed in dialogue with the latter.

Considering their mythic overtones, the classical rabbis were  anxious about the possibility of angels becoming, in the popular consciousness, demigods or autonomous divine beings, sharing or competing with God’s governance. This fear resonates in a caution cited in the name of God, “If a person is in trouble, he should cry neither to Michael nor to Gabriel, rather he should cry to Me and I shall answer him immediately.” (j Berakhot 9:1). Despite an apparent comfort with directing prayers to angels expressed by various opinions in the Talmud and onward up until the modern period, anxiety over angelic ‘polytheism’ persists well beyond the ancient era. It reaches its height in no less than Maimonides’ thirteen principles of faith, where the fifth admonishes worshipping only God to the exclusion of any intermediaries. Rather than dismiss or prohibit something so enchantingly seductive and widely accepted, some resolved their discomfort by reconstructing angels to conform to evolving theological and ethical sensibilities. One particular genus of the species angels known as cherubim, underwent just such a transformation to quell acute rabbinic anxieties they evoked. 
  Cherubim are particularly crucial in the angelic hierarchy geographically, architecturally, and oracularly

The stories of Enosh, Noah, Nimrod, the Tower of Babel, and the marriage of the “sons of God” to human women (Genesis 4–11) all feature the Leitwort החל “began,” signaling an attempt to be more than just human.
The human attempt to become godlike is a consistent theme throughout the opening chapters of Genesis. Each further attempt is highlighted by a form of the word ח.ל.ל “began,” which functions as a Leitwort (“Leading word”; מילה מנחה),[6] as Martin Buber called it, “a word or a word-root that repeats meaningfully within a text, a sequence of texts, or a set of texts.”[7]

The term appears five times in Genesis 4–11. After pursuing the repetitions of the term, the text’s “meaningfulness” unfolds as a series of epochal ‘beginnings’ that chart repeated quests for godlike power inaugurated by Adam and Eve to become like God (Gen 3:5,22).

It is Moses Maimonides, thinking, leading, and writing in twelfth-century Egypt, geographically so close, yet so far, from the land of Israel, who remains substantively critical to any  discussion of the messianic period in Jewish thought. His systematic project of “demythologizing”
Judaism, and draining it of what he considered superstitious and
pagan incursions extend to, and culminate in, his messianic vision. His
messianic construct is inextricably tied to the “ingathering of the oppressed Jews,” a primary aspiration of modern-day Zionism. Although
the messianic era in Maimonides’s thought is a vast topic vigorously debated by both academic scholars and rabbis throughout the ages, I wish here only to offer some further exploration of how Maimonides textually
promotes an activist agenda regarding what he views as the essential accomplishments the messianic era will herald for Jews as a people.

Pope Benedict's address at the University of Regensburg in Germany has aroused anger and criticism from Muslims around the world. Once again, as with the Danish cartoon affair, violence has reared its ugly head as somehow a legitimate "theological" critique of what Muslims have misperceived as an attack on their faith. And once again, these
attacks have been launched without regard of what the Pope actually said.

My mother just turned 90. There were the mazel tovs, the obligatory family gathering, the wishes for the proverbial 120-year life span, and my mother's forced smile as she suppressed her true feelings. Even in good times my mother rarely allows anyone into her inner space. Even in good times my mother rarely allows anyone into her inner space. Her life has been an extended version of the false identity she was forced to assume during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, when disclosure of who she really was meant deportation to places from which no one returned.

This book would be incomplete without a chapter devoted to God,
the one existence that ontologizes placelessness. God does not occupy
space, but provides and governs space, as indicated by the midrashic
translation of the verse “The eternal God is a dwelling place” (Deut
33:27): “He is the dwelling place of the world, but His world is not His
dwelling place” (Gen Rabbah 68:9; quoted in GP I:70, 172–73).2 The locus
of God is pure perfection, and His place in the prophetic texts, for Maimonides, always signifies “His rank and the greatness of His portion in
existence” (GP I:8, 33). As such, there is no greater model for the kind of
place man must ultimately stake out for himself. Imitatio dei would consist
of striving for, and eventually achieving, a place of rank and perfection.
Man’s destination is God, and the road he travels is thought; as he gets
closer to his goal (as discussed in the case of the sage), he merges with
placelessness. Since Maimonides’ entire body of work can be said to be
about God, in this chapter I limit myself to God as shekhinah (Indwelling),
a “manifestation” of God particularly problematic for its later emergence
in the mystical tradition as an actual divine hypostasis.

In this chapter, I continue with Maimonides’ radical deconstruction of God’s presence in the world. As a direct corollary of
the sort of austere presenceless shekhinah explored in chapter 6,
Maimonides had to deal with a host of biblical terms commonly
used with reference to God. On their face, they undermine his
project to “banish” God from the human domain because they
pose seductive lures for drawing Him back in. At the very heart of
Aristotelian physics is the principle of motion, the operative feature of the cosmos. Associated with properties such as potentiality
and actuality endemic to the workings of the natural world, the literal application of motion to God constitutes an offence of capital
proportions. Leading up to the chapter on shakhon, Maimonides
rationalized the biblical use of numerous terms connoting motion,
such as “approach,” “coming,” “going,” and “going out” with respect to God. While doing so, he also constructed an intricate
preface to his avowedly anti-mythological conception of the shekhinah. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct that preface in
pursuit of the acutely outsider God advocated by Maimonides.

n the previous chapters of this book, I have focused on types
of outsiders, both human and divine. Each was shaped by Maimonides to transcend its own particularity, pointing to some universal philosophical offense or virtue, as the case may be. In this
chapter, I turn to a different outsider, the Sabbath, which interrupts the natural rhythm of time and normatively addresses only
one people to the juridical exclusion of all others.1 However, its
message is a universal one—namely, belief in the creation of the
world in time.2 The Jewish obligation to refrain from work on the
seventh day publicizes a common worldwide truth: “For this reason we are ordered by the law to exalt this day, in order that the
principle of the creation of the world in time be established and
universally known in the world through the fact that all people
refrain from working on one and the same day” (GP II:31, 359).3

M aimonides’ introductory letter to his Guide of the Perplexed is
addressed to R. Joseph b. Judah,1 thus personalizing the Guide as
the fruition of a journey he embarked on, some years prior to its
composition, as guide and teacher for a beloved disciple. Despite
their physical separation, it is the cultivation of an intimate relationship between master and student that engendered a host of
passions clearly transcending the pedagogical space of the classroom.2 The master and his disciple are wrapped in an impenetrable intellectual embrace. Their classroom lies outside, not
inside, the educational system. The solitude of the sage can be
penetrated only by the student who desires the company of solitude himself and is prepared to lead the outsider life his master
bequeaths him. In this chapter, I move from constructs of outsiders to the existential predicament of Maimonides himself. Any
study of the sage is also a study of Maimonides’ own personal ambivalence in finding a balance between the inside and the outside

The voluminous corpus of the rabbinic genre known as midrash and aggadah involves not just law (halakhah), but also a prolific repository of unrefined philosophical theology. The aggadic and midrashic style encompasses narrative, allegory, and a deeply intimate exegetical engagement with every syllable of the biblical text. It may not correspond neatly to the kinds of systematic treatises, largely identified with the Christian tradition, through which theology is traditionally delivered. The philosophy and theology that inhere in the midrashic genre are, at the very least, of equal profundity and complexity. One needs only to be attuned to its manner and style of communication, consisting of an unrelenting intricate weave of ciphers and cross-references to its biblical antecedents, to hear a literal barrage of philosophical theology.

Before embarking on a discussion of the long and continuing history of exegetical engagements with Maimonidean thought, it is fitting to examine the dynamics of Maimonides’ own concept of the love of God, a core theological, philosophical, juridical, and Jewish notion. Love is the premiere example of what I consider here to be an essential feature of Jewish intellectual history since Maimonides. It illustrates well the ongoing process of reworking and refining, unfolding internally within his own thought and producing works of different genres that look dialogically to each other – in other words, Maimonides engaging Maimonides.

In this first chapter, I wish to ground some of the claims I have presented cursorily thus far. Since those claims involve "Jewishness,""midrashic" writing, and Maimonides as the "fulcrum of Jewish thought" that succeeded him, my use of this terminology requires some further explication. The question posed by this chapter's subtitle is not difficult to ascertain as far as Maimonides' legal code, the Mishneh Torah, is concerned because the Mishneh Torah deals largely with a corpus of law unique to Judaism and its practice. The question becomes thornier, however, with respect to his philosophical work. According to renowned contemporary political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), whose scholarship on Maimonides elicits much passionate debate, 1 the Guide of the Perplexed "is not a philosophic booka book written by a philosopher for philosophersbut a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews." 2 When I first began my studies on Maimonides, I thought it a trite observation. Over the years, however, I have come to increasingly appreciate its full import, and I return to this quote because I believe, at a very elemental level, it best describes the motivation for my intended project. If we strip away the Guide's undercurrent of Aristotelian philosophy, medieval cosmology, and logic, what kind of a composition are we left with, and how can it continue to be relevant?

The eleventh to fourteenth centuries mark a watershed in the evolution of Jewish thought. The period was anything but a dark age for Judaism, with a strong intellectual tradition in every sphere of thought and practice, including the nascent Jewish mystical movement, kabbalah, and new directions in biblical exegesis, jurisprudence, and Talmudic novellae that proliferated throughout the Jewish world. And yet, despite there having been no shortage of important thinkers and personalities in this era, about whom modern scholars have produced a fertile body of literature, unquestionably the dominant figure of the age was Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, also known by his acronym, Rambam (1138-1204). Maimonides was, on a parochial level, the most eminent authority of rabbinic law in the Jewish world, proficient in all its canonical sources, from the Hebrew Bible through the Talmud, and on to the Geonic sources. In a broader sense, he was also a master of the scientific/philosophical corpus of his day, as evidenced not only by his writings but also by his having risen to a position of official physician in the royal court in Egypt. As a result, the positions he took on matters crucial to Jewish existence and the practice of Judaism seminally influenced the evolution of Jewish thought, worship, and observance ever afterward. Without this potent combination of rabbinic expertise and philosophical acumen, Maimonides could easily have been ignored by devotees of either school and thus would not loom as large over the evolution of Jewish thought or, indeed,

Questions posed by God and biblical characters in the Hebrew Bible are often philosophically empowering moments. They transpire from the very inception of human history, according to the Bible's own reconstructed version of it. Rather than divinely imposed law, biblical questioning is a vital tool initiating the decisive biblical way toward truth through independent investigation. Questions then recur throughout various biblical narratives, revealing the Bible's philosophical dimension. As such, they may indicate the Bible's conception of the essential expression of humanity, or where the Bible locates the beginning of serious thought, and how it suggests proceeding in the search for truth and the highest good. This chapter explores specific episodes where questions are posed, beginning with the Garden of Eden and ending with the book of Job.

Light as a metaphor for truth is one of the images that most strikingly captures the impassable philosophical divide between Maimonides and Crescas. Hans Blumenberg chose light as a prime illustration of a philosophically inexhaustible metaphor throughout the history of philosophy: “Light remains what it is while letting the infinite participate in it; it is consumption without loss.” Since metaphor is a primary instrument of philosophical exegesis Blumenberg’s theory is important for providing a deeper understanding in general of medieval Jewish philosophy. My paper focuses on light as one such root metaphor which illustrates its “inexhaustibility” that illuminates an array of the challenges Crescas mounts against Maimonides. Moses Maimonides’ (1138-1205) Guide of the Perplexed, and his later philosophical and theological arch-nemesis Hasdai Crescas’ (circa 1340-1412) Light of the Lord, are works of philosophical theology intended in a core sense as primers on how to properly understand God’s revealed word. Their different uses of light imagery capture what is the core issue that informs the opposition between them across the theological spectrum. For Maimonides reason is the ultimate arbiter of truth and, ipso facto, of the Torah’s meaning, while for Crescas reason is subordinate to the supra-rational truth of the Torah which alone resolves a faith that is ‘perplexed’. Maimonides incorporates Greek notions of intellect and knowledge as light while Crescas sought to repatriate light to its origins in God and His revelation through Torah. For example, what anticipates Crescas’ entire critique of Maimonides’ thoroughgoing rationalism is his early overturning of Maimonides’ hierarchy of light which grades people in terms of its length and intensity ascending from a darkness that does not even qualify as a level of existence to its peak of “unceasing light”. Crescas immediately subverts Maimonides’ hierarchy of light with one grounded in divine grace free to discriminate as to who will be its recipient. What is sight for Maimonides is blindness for Crescas.

The particular feature the Guide shares with midrash is the pervasive use of scriptural citation that, as in its rabbinic precursor, does not act merely as proof text but generates new meaning out of the tension orchestrated between its setting within the Guide and its original context.' The Guide presents a sustained philosophical hermeneutic that innovates
while anchored in tradition, and in what follows I demonstrate how
this actually operates with one such apparent submissive nod to past authority via citation, while at the same time recontextualizing to break
with the past. In this case it is the superscript that will be shown to bear this out,a particularly vital citation, most apt in that it looms behind Maimonides 'entire philosophical project and colors every discourse with past tradition in his text.
The epigraphic verse from Isaiah, "Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation that keepeth faithfulness may enter in " (26:2), which marks the transition between the introduction and the first chapter of the Guide, immediately sets the tone for its midrashic undertaking.

a) Jacob and Esau: A Fractured Reunion 
b) The Torah’s Most Human Sense Of An Ending
c)Samson: A Life Squandered
d) Samuel:
    i)Saul’s Beginnings: The Eyes Have It (I,9)
    ii)David as Anarchy Personified (I,29)
    iii)David As Halakhic Authority: Rabbinic Satire (II,11)
    iv)Absalom’s Strategic Assault on David’s ‘Justice’ (Mishpat) (II,15)
e) Kings:
    i)False Prophets: Sycophants, Programmers, and Plagiarists (I, 22)
    ii)Letting Go: The Defining Challenge of Parenting (II,2)
    iii) Josiah the ‘Shema’ King (II, 23(
f)Jeremiah;
  i)Hananiah’s Demagoguery (Jer 28)
  ii) Measure For Measure: Failure to grant liberty leads to the loss of liberty (Jer 34)
g)Ezekiel:
  i)A Cosmic Betrothal Model (Ezek 16)
  ii)Overturning Outmoded Theologies (Ezek 18)
  iii))‘You Shall Live by Them’: Assimilation Threatens Israel’s Existence (Ezek 20)
  iv)) Challenging God In The People’s Defense: Ezekiel’s Failure (Ezek 22)
  v)Cutting the Deified King Down to Size (Ezek 28)
  vi)Ezekiel Renames Jerusalem (Ezek 48)
h) Jacob’s Freudian Moment (Hosea 12)
i)Elijah The Messianic Family Therapist (Malachi 3)
j) Job:
    i)  Job in the Warsaw Ghetto (ch. 4)
    ii) Job vs Eliphaz: Choice Between Life and Ideology (6)
    iii)Job’s Existential Sickness of Life (9)
    iv)Job’s Demand for Judicial Review (13)
    v)The Law And The Pen As Weapons Of Resistance (19)
    vi)Shaddai: Gracious And Munificent, Or Overpowering And Conquering (23)
    vii) Abraham, Joseph And Job: Where Theology gives way to Justice  (27)
    viii) Job and the Origins of the Term ‘Shoah’ (30(
      ix) The Job That Lacks Wisdom (32)
      x) A Life Of Ceaseless Questioning (38)
      xi) The Dust and Ashes of the Human Condition (42)

It is now Leonard Cohen's fifth yahrzeit and, though there has been a myriad of commemorative articles since "closing time," as he would have referred to it, there is always room for another look at his Jewish legacy. Just as the ending of one cycle of Torah readings marks the beginning of the next, Cohen understood the blurring of beginnings and endings-Closing time / Every new beginning / Comes from some other beginning's end.

The term  "ivri" is freighted with both theological and national meaning that  points not just to a semantic tension, but to a permanent tension within Jewish identity itself. To ask what is an ivri is in effect to ask “Who is a Jew?” In the past half-century, that question has been most often associated with debates over conversion and patrilineal descent in the context of Israeli citizenship and Jewish law (halakhah), but indeed its scope is much wider. What does it mean to be Jewish? and what is it that sustains membership in and deeply rooted loyalty to the Jewish community? The history of the particularly elusive term ivri can help us locate this unknowable “thing” that somehow inspires familiarity among strangers. And an investigation of its evolution, as will be seen, may best move us forward in the quest for the holy grail of Jewish identity.

Rather than chart some steadily evolving theology which R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira’s Warsaw Ghetto sermons phenomenologically defy, I note six critical theological junctures and one overarching juncture. Each is accompanied by new explications not noted previously, revealing moments that signal an exhaustion with traditional responses to suffering. As such I present a programmatic reading of the sermons’ haltingly unprogrammatic improvised widening of the door to alternatives that deviate from accepted theodicies. Although I do refer to historical dates periodically, my analysis intentionally refrains from correlating the sermons to specific events in the Ghetto. The sermons are more importantly a reflection of R. Shapira’s own internal struggles evoking theological discourse in the face of a theological novum or rupture. Though there might occur after each juncture momentary withdrawals or relapses, these critical junctures remain embedded in his consciousness. Once each is contemplated, there is no turning back.

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe, spent his last years theologizing, sermonizing, and writing in the Warsaw Ghetto. Like Franz Rosenzweig before him, who wrote much of the Star of Redemption, his philosophical magnum opus, under the extreme conditions of a war-ravaged landscape during World War I, R. Shapira produced his own theologically tormented masterpiece within an environment designed for the sole purpose of generating suffering-a death space. This chapter addresses Shapira's paradoxical adaptation of Maimonidean rationalism in service of his own mystical-Hasidic attempt to overcome rationalism in the context of extreme suffering. My aim here is to further advance an argument that I have presented elsewhere: that the full force of R. Shapira's exegetical strategy can be appreciated only in light of the long history of engagement with Maimonidean thought from the Middle Ages to the modern period. 1 I will also elaborate on how this striking transformation of a bedrock of Maimonides's Aristotelian epistemology into a Hasidic mystical theology of suffering serves as the logical culmination of R. Shapira's own prewar engagement with Maimonides. This revamped theology was made necessary by heightened fear and awareness of the "rage" (za' am) that R. Shapira understood as the defining characteristic of the escalating devastation

I attempt to
decipher, both inner-biblically and philosophically, those biblical reports of divine vision accompanied by some change of heart signaled by “regret” or relent (nhm) , what prominent biblical scholars consider an “essential feature of biblical theology.” This exercise involves
close readings of key biblical passages  to treat the phenomenon of divine “regret” by  tracing its meaning along a series of human ‘beginnings’ from creation at the beginning of Genesis to the Tower of Babel episode in chapter 11. The result is a model of applied philosophical exegesis concerning therelationship between God and humankind that resonates well beyond the narrow illustration of
regret, an issue vital to any Jewish philosophical theology.
My readings apply a hybrid of various hermeneutical approaches to scriptural texts.

Ahab’s 400 court prophets all assure him that he will defeat Aram, but the prophet Micaiah tells him that these prophets are being enticed by a lying spirit, sent by YHWH himself, for the purpose of destroying Ahab. If Ahab had been willing to face his own position vis-a-vis God honestly, he would have known who was telling the truth.

Maimonides' Guide raises more questions than answers in the quest for the ultimate truth of all existence. His religion does not offer the comfort many people of faith seek in their traditions. It entails a perpetual struggle for meaning and a life of accumulating knowledge to the point where one can truly say from  an informed  vantage point that one does not know.

While the Passover Seder is meant to commemorate the Jewish liberation from slavery, it is also permeated by loss. Maimonides's compendium of Seder conduct emphasizes the absence of an irretrievable past with repeated reminders of how Jews can no longer ideally celebrate the Seder. Two types of meat must decorate the Seder plate in remembrance of the holiday sacrifices; four questions revised to address a ritually debilitated present when we no longer have sacrifice launch the evening; the participants point to meat signifying the Passover lamb which our forefathers ate at the time the Temple stood; the celebrants recite a prayer anticipating a future when they will once again eat there the Passover sacrifice; the matzah calls for a blessing in the present when there is no longer sacrifice; one prepares a sandwich of matzah and bitter herbs in remembrance of the Temple. The list is unrelenting.

Isaac Arama (1420–1494), the most influential preacher in the generation of the expulsion from Spain, attempted a balance between what he considered a foreign Greek body of rational knowledge on the one hand, and a supra-rational revealed knowledge native to Judaism's prophetic tradition on the other. This article focuses on an aspect of his creative exegesis and in particular his engagement with Maimonides that was powerful enough, in addition to other historical factors of course, to close the chapter on Jewish philosophical exegesis which Maimonides spearheaded. Often, his own exegesis is pointedly constructed to subvert Maimonides' own exegesis and thus offer an alternative direction for biblical commentary that mediates between the rigor of philosophical reasoning, or the authority of the mind, and the existential faith commitment to revelation , or the authority of God.

The meaning of God’s names, especially YHWH, is central to Jewish theology. Two approaches have dominated: the philosophical, focusing on God’s essence (“being”) and the kabbalistic, focusing on God’s evolving relationship with Israel (“becoming”). Some modern thinkers such as Malbim and Heschel have looked for new syntheses or formulations.

Leonard Cohen, the poet laureate of popular music for the last half century has passed away. One cannot fully appreciate the depth of  poetry's spiritual intensity without its inextricable tie to his Jewishness. Though it is impossible to reduce a complex legend such as Cohen to one essential talent or dimension that explains his universal adulation, perhaps it is this Jewishness that, at least partially, accounts for his broad appeal, as well as his extraordinary attraction in Israel.

The bridge that enables the annual traversal from the ending of the Torah back to its beginning is the anticipation of new questions. Prof. James A. Diamond " After [Abraham] was weaned, while still an infant, his mind began to reflect. By day and night he was thinking and wondering, " How is it possible that this sphere should continuously be guiding the world and have no one to guide it … his mind was busily working and reflecting until he attained the way of truth, and apprehended the correct line of thought. He knew that there was one God who guides the celestial sphere and created everything… " (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot ʿAvodah Zarah 1:3) According to Maimonides the catalyst for the discovery of monotheism and its eventual development into the religion of Judaism is a question rooted in a child's pristine moment of wonder, awe, and reflection. That same wonder inspired by nature is mirrored in the perplexity stimulated by biblical and rabbinic texts. Both world and text are encountered in a web of persistent questioning. The canonical scriptures of Judaism perpetually engage because they perpetually intrigue both by the questions they raise and the questions raised by their protagonists. Every year, the cluster of holidays concentrated at the beginning of the Jewish calendar climaxes with a celebration of an ending that anticipates a new beginning of annual Torah readings. Suspense is not what holds our attention; as we conclude the Torah, we all know well what happens next. What drives us back into the text again and again are

Existential questions are the big questions about the human condition: love, death, freedom, evil, suffering, and suicide. These questions were treated by existentialists as an end unto themselves. As Paul Tillich write: "only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers" (The Dynamics of Faith, 94). In a similar vein, Elie Wiesel wrote "every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer." (Night). James Diamond in his new book seeks to create a Jewish theology of questions from the text of Maimonides. James A. Diamond holds the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo. He earned an

In this erudite study she blends the two worlds together, demonstrating that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim strains of thought in the medieval Iberian Peninsula, known as al-Andalus, from the tenth to the twelfth centuries cannot be isolated into separate strands but rather can only be fully appreciated holistically as “integrative intellectual history” (22). She persuasively argues that, despite the relatively insignificant size of the Jewish community in this region, Jewish thought disproportionately contributed to the development of Islamicate philosophy.

George Kohler’s recent book comprehensively surveys varied approaches to the study of Kabbalah undertaken by the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement in the course of the nineteenth century. It amounts to a formidable J’accuse against Scholem for having failed to live up to his self-imposed responsibility when evaluating his scholarly predecessors in the Wissenschaft movement. It methodically eviscerates Scholem’s negative characterization regarding both the substance of and motivation behind Wissenschaft’s disdain for the Jewish mystical tradition beginning with the Zohar.

Princeton University Press, 2018, 227pp., $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780691174235. Reviewed by James A. Diamond, University of Waterloo In his most recent book, Alan Mittleman, an eminent Jewish philosopher and ethicist, courageously builds a philosophical defense of 'holiness', a religious idea that seems hopelessly indefensible in a modern liberal democracy. The challenge he confronts is formidable considering that holiness has received a lot of bad press of late. The near daily spate of suicide bombings, torture, rape, and enslavement of those not of like religious mind purportedly in the name of holiness or jihad underscores the demonic elements of a religious term normally associated with an edifying notion of sanctity. It is simply not enough to dismiss these actions as unholy or profane since many of them are committed with a sincere religious conviction in their sacredness. Mittleman's book further advances what can be considered a lifelong project related to his deep-seated concern for religious ethics. It is a welcome addition to the Jewish ethical theory he explored previously within the context of such themes as covenant (A

Every work on Jewish thought and law since the twelfth century bears the imprint of Maimonides. A. N. Whitehead's famous dictum that the entire European philosophical tradition 'consists of a series of footnotes to Plato' could equally characterize Maimonides' place in the Jewish tradition. The critical studies in this volume explore how Orthodox rabbis of different orientations - Shlomo Aviner, Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (Netziv), Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Joseph Kafih, Abraham Isaac Kook, Aaron Kotler, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Elhanan Wasserman - have read and provided footnotes to Maimonides in the long twentieth century. How well did they really understand Maimonides? And where do their arguments fit in the mainstream debates about him and his works? Each of the seven core chapters examines a particular approach. Some rabbis have tried to liberate themselves from the influence of his ideas. Others have sought to build on those ideas or expand them in ways which Maimonides himself did not pursue, and which he may well not have agreed with. Still others advance patently non-Maimonidean positions, while attributing them to none other than Maimonides. Above all, the essays published here demonstrate that his legacy remains vibrantly alive today.

This book examines a wide range of theologians, philosophers, and exegetes who share a passionate engagement with Maimonides, assaulting, adopting, subverting, or adapting his philosophical and jurisprudential thought. This ongoing enterprise is critical to any appreciation of the broader scope of Jewish law, philosophy, biblical interpretation, and Kabbalah.
Review
"James Diamond's book is a wonderfully rich, subtle, and erudite exposition of Maimonides' central and complex place in the history of Jewish thought. In his emphasis on Maimonides as an interpreter of prior canonical texts and in his analysis of the complex and deep ways in which Maimonides' own works became, in turn canonical, Diamond makes a highly important and remarkable contribution to understanding Jewish thought as essentially an interpretative tradition."
Moshe Halbertal, New York University School of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of Maimonides: Life and Thought

"A fascinating consideration of Judaism's most important thinker and the battles that have been fought over his ideas in the centuries following his death. Diamond's study begins with a sustained look at Maimonides himself and the central place that the love of God occupied in his view of Judaism. From there the book goes on to consider various understandings, and misunderstandings, of the master by a series of later thinkers, from Nahmanides and Abarbanel to such diverse moderns as Hermann Cohen, the Netziv, and Abraham Isaac Kook. This book is an intellectual tour de force, but more than that, it is an essential guide to understanding the 'thinking' part of Judaism in our own day."
James Kugel, Harvard University

"In this uncommonly stimulating and deeply learned book, James Diamond has captured not only the development of a particular tradition within Judaism but also the excitement of tradition generally. His account of the extraordinary afterlife of Maimonides, this saga of assents and dissents through the centuries, establishes the primacy, and the originality, and the beauty of interpretation as a mode of thought. This study of the sustenance of ideas is itself intellectually sustaining; it is itself a link in the chain that it skillfully portrays."
Leon Wieseltier

consists of a series of studies addressing Moses Maimonides' (1138–1204) appropriation of marginal figures—lepers, converts, heretics, and others—normally considered on the fringes of society and religion. Each chapter focuses on a type or character that, in Maimonides' hands, becomes a metaphor for a larger, more substantive theological and philosophical issue. Diamond offers a close reading of key texts, such as the Guide of the Perplexed and the Mishneh Torah, demonstrating the importance of integrating Maimonides' legal and philosophical writings. Converts, Heretics, and Lepers fills an important void in Jewish studies by focusing on matters of exegesis and hermeneutics as well as philosophical concerns. Diamond's alternative reading of central topics in Maimonides suggests that literary appreciation is a key to deciphering Maimonides' writings in particular and Jewish exegetical texts in general.

"Converts, Heretics, and Lepers is a very sophisticated exploration of Maimonidean religious philosophy. Although there have been numerous studies on Maimonides, perhaps more than any other Jewish thinker, James Diamond manages to approach the master from fresh perspectives. The result is a stunningly lucid and deep engagement with Maimonides."—Elliot Wolfson, Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University

Winner of the Nachman Sokol-Mollie Halberstadt Prize in Biblical/Rabbinic Scholarship from the Canadian Jewish Book Awards Committee

Examines how Maimonides integrates scriptural and rabbinic literature into his magnum opus, The Guide of the Perplexed.

Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment demonstrates the type of hermeneutic that the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) engaged in throughout his treatise, The Guide of the Perplexed. By comprehensively analyzing Maimonides’ use of rabbinic and scriptural sources, James Arthur Diamond argues that,far from being merely prooftexts, they are in fact essential components of Maimonides’ esoteric stratagem. Diamond’s close reading of biblical and rabbinic citations in the Guide not only penetrates its multilayered structure to arrive at its core meaning, but also distinguishes Maimonides as a singular contributor to the Jewish exegetical tradition.

“Diamond’s book allows us to appreciate Maimonides’ exegetical genius as has not been demonstrated before.” — SPECULUM

Jewish Theology Unbound challenges the widespread misinterpretation of Judaism as a religion of law as opposed to theology. James A. Diamond provides close readings of the Bible, classical rabbinic texts, Jewish philosophers, and mystics from the ancient, medieval, and modern period, which communicate a profound Jewish philosophical theology on human nature, God, and the relationship between the two.

The study begins with an examination of questioning in the Hebrew Bible, demonstrating that what the Bible encourages is independent philosophical inquiry into how to situate oneself in the world ethically, spiritually, and teleologically. It explores such themes as the nature of God through the various names by which God is known in the Jewish intellectual tradition, love of others and of God, death, martyrdom, freedom, angels, the philosophical quest, the Holocaust, and the state of Israel, all in light of the Hebrew Bible and the way it is filtered through the rabbinic, philosophical, and mystical traditions.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Plotting and Subplotting Jewish Philosophical Theology

1. Unbinding a Jewish Philosophical Theology Out of the Past
2. Biblical Questioning and Divine Astonishment: Philosophy Begins in Anguish
3. Naming an Unnameable God: Divine Being or Divine Becoming
4. Using God's Name for the Mundane: Halakhic Expressions of Becoming
5. The Narrative Hell and Normative Bliss of Biblical Love
6. Biblical Knowing Toward Death: The Silent Sound of Dying for Others
7. The Original Jewish Debate over Religious Martyrdom
8. Angelic Encounters as Metaphysics
9. Freedom or Determinism? Constructs of the Slave as Ciphers for Free Will
10. A God That Ceased to Become, A Nation that May Have Ceased to Exist
Conclusion: Looking Beyond Jewish Death toward Rebirth

Review of James Diamond, Jewish Theology Unbound James Diamond. Jewish Theology Unbound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 304pp. $110. Alexander Green SUNY Buffalo James Diamond's new book Jewish Theology Unbound is a powerful argument for why Jews should be encouraged to think of their identity in philosophical terms, grounded in questioning and self-examination.

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Book Review: Jewish Theology Unbound by James A. Diamond By Aaron Hughes | 7 hours ago James A. Diamond, Jewish Theology Unbound Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. In his Lonely Man of Faith, Joseph B. Soloveitchik begins by articulating a problem besetting contemporary human existence. How can the person of faith, he asks, live in a utilitarian society that mistakes its own materialism for magnificence and that recognizes nothing beyond its own temporality? How can such an individual, Soloveitchik continues, live "by a doctrine which has no technical potential, [and] by a law which cannot be tested in the laboratory"? If we were to translate this into contemporary parlance, we might say: In a "selfie" world where do we find one another and how do we locate something transcendent in the quotidian? Certainly we are taught in university courses that the fundament of such questions-only now with the face of "faith" subsequently rearranged and given the new name of "reason"-is ancient Greece. What is the meaning of life, of death, of freedom, and of evil? We are also told how such questions are universal and that the answers to them of catholic applicability. Emblazoned on the entranceway to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, philosophy professors tell us, were the words, "Know Thyself," just as centuries later Kant's "Dare to Know" become the rallying call of the European Enlightenment. What links these two slogans is knowledge and the nature of the questions that spur us to seek answers to them. But the call for universality, as any minority will remind us, threatens the particular with erasure. That which neither fits nor conforms becomes a problem, and no matter how much we may proclaim that the particular is indexical of the universal, as we are all prone to do in Jewish thought, the latter simply shrugs and turns its back. Framed somewhat differently: lost between the Platonic and the Kantian bookends of the Western philosophical corpus resides the religious tradition of Judaism. Not only is it lost, it is frequently and actively muted. When Kant wrote the above words, his lodestar was Protestant Christianity, especially that which he considered its spiritualized ethical teachings based on pure love. Judaism, by contrast, failed to "satisfy the essential criteria of [a] religion" since it lacked the appropriate inner orientation to moral laws. This reduction of Judaism to the law and the concomitant assumption that the tradition is devoid of faith and theology resides at the heart of Diamond's impressive Jewish Theology Unbound. Standing upon the shoulders of the Jewish philosophical tradition, something he has articulated historically in a host of award-winning publications, Diamond here tries something slightly different, though certainly no less rigorous. His goal is nothing short of articulating, or perhaps better recovering, a-not the-philosophical theology that emerges from Jewish sources. I, for one, appreciate this locution. I have read too many books and been involved in too many projects devoted to Jewish philosophy/theology that claim to tell us exactly what Judaism is or is not. Diamond's hesitation and cautiousness is the spring from which all good reflection both begins and ends. Diamond's gift is as exciting as it is refreshing. He takes it upon himself to show how (1) Jewish sources (Bible, and subsequent rabbinic, legal, theological, philosophical, and mystical interpretation) contribute to the asking (and answering) of large philosophical questions from the vantage point of the particular; and (2) how such questions and answers are no less sophisticated, meaningful, or spiritual than that produced by other religious traditions, but especially that of Christian theology, which seems, at least on first glance, to have a stranglehold on the engagement with theological reflection. Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/unbinding-the-particular?fbclid=IwAR2OMeDm0lx0N4TDloGutXIpFkxJMUUxBdcS1mpamYoCiGPvlxF1-DmRaLM)