Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Believing and Its Tensions: A Personal Conversation about God, Torah, Suffering and Death in Jewish Thought
    Believing and Its Tensions: A Personal Conversation about God, Torah, Suffering and Death in Jewish Thought
    Believing and Its Tensions: A Personal Conversation about God, Torah, Suffering and Death in Jewish Thought
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Believing and Its Tensions: A Personal Conversation about God, Torah, Suffering and Death in Jewish Thought

    By Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    An intimate and candid examination of the changing nature of belief and where it can lead us—from the life experience of one of Judaism's leading thinkers.

    For over five decades, Rabbi Neil Gillman has helped people think through the most challenging questions at the heart of being a believing religious person. In this intimate rethinking of his own theological journey he explores the changing nature of belief and the complexities of reconciling the intellectual, emotional and moral questions of his own searching mind and soul.

    • If what we have in recognizing, speaking of and experiencing God is a wide-ranging treasury of humanly crafted metaphors, what, then, is the ultimate reality, the ultimate nature of God? What lies beyond the metaphors?
    • If humanity was an active partner in revelation—if the human community participated in what was revealed and gave it meaning—what then should be the authority of Jewish law?
    • How do we cope—intellectually, emotionally and morally—with suffering, the greatest challenge to our faith commitment, relationship with God and sense of a fundamentally ordered world?
    • Death is inevitable but why is it built in as part of the total life experience?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateJul 13, 2013
    ISBN9781580237741
    Believing and Its Tensions: A Personal Conversation about God, Torah, Suffering and Death in Jewish Thought
    Author

    Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD

    Neil Gillman, rabbi and PhD, is professor of Jewish philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he has served as chair of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and dean of the Rabbinical School. He is author of Believing and Its Tensions: A Personal Conversation about God, Torah, Suffering and Death in Jewish Thought; The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Publishers Weekly "Best Book of the Year"; The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism; The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians; Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life (all Jewish Lights); and Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

    Read more from Rabbi Neil Gillman, Ph D

    Related to Believing and Its Tensions

    Related ebooks

    Judaism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Editorial

      Dec 30, 2019

      Editorial
      1 min read

    • Article

      Man of Science, Man of Faith

      Sep 22, 2017

      Man of Science, Man of Faith
      14 min read

    • Article

      Faith For Troubled Times

      May 18, 2021

      Faith For Troubled Times
      4 min read

    • Article

      Black Buddhists, Black Buddhisms

      Jun 28, 2022

      Black Buddhists, Black Buddhisms
      3 min read

    • Article

      BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

      Dec 13, 2022

      Patricia Rockman, MD; Allison McLay, DCS; and M. Lee Freedman, MD • New Harbinger Nothing can kill the spirit of genuine mindfulness more quickly than a one-size-fits-all attitude, and nowhere is that illustrated more potently than with teenagers. If

      4 min read

    • Article

      An Apex of Babble

      Mar 6, 2019

      An Apex of Babble
      13 min read

    • Article

      For Love Of Strangers: Behind The Jewish Legacy Of Welcoming Refugees

      Oct 31, 2018

      For many, the question of whether to accept refugees into the United States comes down to politics. For many Jews – as well as Muslims and Christians – it is “a matter of moral commitment.”

      6 min read

    • Article

      Cancel Culture’s Flip Side: Gen Zers Befriend Political Foes

      Nov 20, 2019

      A study of college students showed researchers that interfaith friendships have a positive influence on attitudes toward people of other views.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Your Saved-my-life Books

      Jan 1, 2024

      Your Saved-my-life Books
      2 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Nov 20, 2018

      What Fake Buddha Quotes Can Teach Us About Buddhism By Bodhipaksa Parallax Press 2018; 144 pp., $11.95 (paper) Did you ever hear or read that famous Buddha quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear?” Well, the Buddha didn’t say it. T

      5 min read

    • Article

      Elaine Pagels Is Famous For Asking Hard Questions. Her Latest: ‘Why Religion?’

      Dec 19, 2018

      The scholar’s professional life has been about challenging orthodox ways of thinking about Christianity. In her new book, she shows the personal struggle behind that quest.

      7 min read

    • Article

      BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

      Jan 26, 2021

      The Path Back to Connection in a Fractured World Sarah Wilson • Dey St. Anyone who read Sarah Wilson’s First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, her remarkable 2018 memoir about shifting our approach to anxiety and mental illness, will have high expectatio

      8 min read

    • Article

      The New American Judaism

      Feb 12, 2024

      The New American Judaism
      11 min read

    • Article

      Shinzen Young

      Nov 17, 2020

      I SOMETIMES SAY: “I’m a Jewish-American Buddhist teacher who got turned on to comparative mysticism by an Irish-Catholic priest and who has developed a Burmese-Japanese fusion practice inspired by the spirit of quantified science.” I was born in 1944

      2 min read

    • Article

      Dr. Anouk Aimée Shambrook

      Sep 19, 2023

      I’M A BLACK BUDDHIST teacher in a troubled America. I was raised in a conservative white town in Southern California. My Haitian mother and Irish father raised my siblings and me Catholic. They also introduced us to Buddhist philosophy. Maman would l

      2 min read

    • Article

      BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

      Oct 18, 2022

      What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What it Can Teach Us Kim Haines-Eitzen • Princeton University Press Most of us likely think of deserts as barren with no redeeming value. Not so for Kim Haines-Eitzen, who finds a rich soundscape t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Jan 21, 2020

      A Memoir By Rebecca Solnit Viking 2020; 256 pp., $26 (cloth) Each chapter of this memoir has the punch of a stand-alone essay, but taken as a whole they’re even more powerful. In Recollections of My Nonexistence, the famed writer (Men Explain Things

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Believing and Its Tensions

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Believing and Its Tensions - Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD

      For Nava Gillman Kass

      52495.jpg

      Let me view your countenance,

      Let me hear your voice;

      For your voice is sweet

      Your countenance, comely.

      —Song of Songs 2:14

      Contents

      Preface

      Chapter 1

      God

      Chapter 2

      Torah

      Chapter 3

      Suffering

      Chapter 4

      Death

      Notes

      Suggestions for Further Reading

      About the Author

      Copyright

      Also Available

      About Jewish Lights

      Sign Up for E-mail Updates

      Send Us Your Feedback

      Preface

      The original inspiration for this book was a brief conversation with the then managing editor of the periodical Conservative Judaism. The conversation coincided with my decision to retire from teaching at The Jewish Theological Seminary after a career of just about fifty years as a member and ultimately the chairman of the Department of Jewish Philosophy. I was then in my midseventies and was tiring of the rounds of classroom activity, faculty committee meetings, the submitting of syllabi, and the grading of papers. I had always enjoyed an active role in publishing and in adult education programs around the country.

      My colleague’s suggestion was that I owed my students at the Seminary and elsewhere a summary statement of my theological legacy. I had published a number of shorter papers and had been lecturing on what I considered to be the central theological issues of the day. But since my original publication, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew (1990), I had not published a summary statement of where I stood on the wide range of issues that Jewish theologians have dealt with over the past centuries.

      To my astonishment, Sacred Fragments continued to be my personal best seller, and upon rereading it, I discovered how much it still reflected both my current thinking some twenty years later and my more recent thinking on central issues. I resolved then that if I followed my colleague’s advice, I would write a much shorter book that would concentrate on the issues on which my thinking has changed and the extent to which this change reflected my ongoing teaching and lecturing in the past decade. The book would deal with four issues: God, revelation, suffering, and death.

      The original problem that I encountered was that until this conversation, I had been resolved to work on an anthology of commentaries on the biblical story of the akedah, Binding of Isaac, modeled somewhat on Nahum Glatzer’s Dimensions of Job. I had been teaching full-semester courses on the akedah and its interpretations and had accumulated a good deal of midrashic, philosophical, interreligious, and general humanistic explications of this enigmatic story. I had quickly realized that there was no single anthology of this material.

      I had enlisted the help of two student research assistants in thinking through how to organize that material, and I had even obtained a preliminary consent from my publisher, Jewish Lights, to publish that book as well.

      It was clear to me, however, that I could not work on both books at the same time. The more I reflected on my immediate priorities, the more intrigued I was by the idea of working first on my theological legacy. In order to free myself to do this, I engaged one of my former research assistants, Rabbi Noah Farkas, now a congregational rabbi in California, to concentrate on the akedah book with my assistance and support, while I worked on the theology book. Jewish Lights agreed with this proposal.

      To my dismay, as I began to outline the new book, I became ill, and I have since endured two bouts of struggling with cancer, the first involving surgery and radiation and the second involving extensive chemotherapy—both demanding significant expenditures of time and energy.

      I determined, however, that the theology book should be completed, and although I could not work on the computer, I could easily dictate the contents of the four main chapters, because I had been teaching this material and lecturing on the road. The idiom that I was using to convey this material was very fresh in my mind and in my mouth, so it could easily be dictated and ultimately transcribed into print. The print version could then be edited. The result is what you have before you. I am particularly grateful to Emily Wichland of Jewish Lights for the grace and thoroughness with which she guided my manuscript into print.

      I should emphasize that this is hardly a revision of Sacred Fragments. It certainly is an updating and, I believe, a much more forthright, maybe even controversial, statement of my current views. I also aimed to write a much more colloquial statement, considerably more concise and omitting the extensive argumentation and justification for my current conclusions. A brief bibliography directs the reader to the books that have influenced me. The views expressed here represent my conclusions to date. None of us can ever be certain of what lies ahead, and conceivably—maybe even desirably—my thinking will continue to evolve. Of course, at this stage of my life, there are no guarantees.

      Since my retirement from active teaching at the Seminary, I have found an alternative home with the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El in New York City. Skirball has provided me with a new community of students who are eager to delve into theological issues. I am grateful to Rabbi Alfredo Borodofsky and Rabbi Yael Smilowitz for having provided me with these new opportunities to teach.

      I am also grateful to the members of what we have come to call the Ostow Seminar. This workshop was created decades ago by my late teacher and then colleague Dr. Mortimer Ostow, a prominent psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and committed Conservative Jew. Morty suggested that he and I cochair a discussion group composed of psychotherapists and Jewish Theological Seminary faculty to discuss the psychological effects of Jewish liturgy and worship. This group continued to meet even after Morty’s death, and the topics of discussion have moved far away from the original intent. But our further discussions, often bearing on neuroscience and religion, are reflected in the pages of this book. I am grateful for the group’s continued interest and commitment to our study experience.

      When I began to publish books, I resolved to dedicate them to members of my family. I have followed this procedure except for once, when I dedicated my study of Conservative Judaism to my students at the Seminary and elsewhere. However, there are dedicatory statements in all of my other books to my wife Sarah, to my daughters and sons-in-law, and to four of my grandchildren. Now God has graced me with a new granddaughter, born on erev Yom Kippur three years ago. Her birth has undoubtedly helped to serve as the conscious or unconscious inspiration to publish another book, which is therefore dedicated to her, Nava Gillman Kass. She is, providentially, filled with the kind of spirit, courage, and forthrightness in her personality that I hope you will find embodied in these theological statements.

      My wife and daughters have been sources of support beyond measure during the course of my recent illness. They have made possible my survival.

      I must also express my gratitude to two research assistants, Nina Kretzmer and Gella Solomon, both of whom are totally familiar with all of the twists and turns of my thinking over the past years, and both of whom contributed to getting the oral version of this book into print. But most of all, I am grateful to my son-in-law, Professor Michael Prince of Boston University, who, working from past drafts, produced the version that is largely the basis for this published book. That effort, at a time when I was most dependent on the help of others, was simply indispensable. I thank him for this splendid act of generosity.

      TXT-orn.tif

      Chapter 1

      God

      Several

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1