Description: This book presents the possibility of a robust dialogue for all who are committed to critique and enhance the problem of graven images and yet know that even the absent God must be accounted for in contemporary thought. It includes the reflections of significant commentators, ...
Brief description: David Novak is the author of nineteen books, the latest being Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, and Nature which received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award in 2020. His 2000 book, Covenantal Rights received the American Academy of Religion Award in 2000 for Best Book in Constructive Religious Thought. He is also the author of The Sanctity of Human Life (2009) and Zionism and Judaism: A New Theory (2016). He had edited four books and authored over 300 articles and reviews in numerous scholarly and intellectual journals. He is also one of the co-authors of the 2000 manifesto, Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity, which has been translated into eight languages. In 2019 he received the James Q. Wilson Award from the Association for the Study of Free Institutions at Princeton University; and Prix Philippe Pinel in Rome from the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, and L'Académie International d'Éthique, Medécine et Politique Publique.
Review Quotes:
"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." --Elliot Dorff, American Jewish University, author of Knowing God: Jewish Journeys to the Unknowable
"There has long been in contemporary Jewish thought a large absence just where, one imagined, God ought to be. This volume's editors and contributors jump bravely into the breach, armed only with classical scholarship, philosophic understanding, literary sensitivity, moral urgency and, before and after all else, imagination. The result is this passionate book, gathering living ideas in mid-flight and words pushed to their limits, marking new traces across that Void." --Yehudah Mirsky, Brandeis University, author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution