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Unknown, 2005
Current format, Unknown, 2005, , No Longer Available.
Unknown, 2005
Current format, Unknown, 2005, , No Longer Available. Offered in 0 more formats
Known most widely as a spiritual writer and for his active role in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s, Abraham Joshua Heschel made major scholarly contributions to the fields of biblical studies, rabbinics, medieval Jewish philosophy, Hasidism, and mysticism. Yet his most ambitious scholarly achievement, his three volume study of rabbinic Judaism, is only now appearing in English, thirty-two years after his death.
Developing the well-known insight that the world of rabbinic thought can be divided into two types or schools, those of Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Ishmael, Heschel shows how the historical disputes between the two are based on a fundamental disagreement over the nature of revelation and religion. Furthermore, this disagreement constitutes a basic ongoing polarity within Judaism between immanence and transcendence, mysticism and rationalism, neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism. Heschel then goes on to show how these two fundamental theologies of revelation may be used to interpret a great number of topics central to Judaism.
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