The Formation Of A Modern Rabbi

An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.

A thorough examination of the life and work of Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, an important contributor to the creation of a modern Jewish Orthodoxy during the late 1800s.

The term ‘rabbi’ predominantly denotes Jewish men qualified to interpret the Torah and apply halacha, or those entrusted with the religious leadership of a Jewish community. However, the role of the rabbi has been understood differently across the Jewish world. While in Israel they control legally powerful rabbinical courts and major religious political parties, in the Jewish communities of the Diaspora this role is often limited by legal regulations of individual countries. However, the significance of past and present rabbis and their religious and political influence endures across the world. Rabbis of Our Time provides a comprehensive overview of the most influential rabbinical authorities of Judaism in the 20th and 21st Century. Through focussing on the most theologically influential rabbis of the contemporary era and examining their political impact, it opens a broader discussion of the relationship between Judaism and politics. It looks at the various centres of current Judaism and Jewish thinking, especially the State of Israel and the USA, as well as locating rabbis in various time periods. Through interviews and extracts from religious texts and books authored by rabbis, readers will discover more about a range of rabbis, from those before the formation of Israel to the most famous Chief Rabbis of Israel, as well as those who did not reach the highest state religious functions, but influenced the relation between Judaism and Israel by other means. The rabbis selected represent all major contemporary streams of Judaism, from ultra-Orthodox/Haredi to Reform and Liberal currents, and together create a broader picture of the scope of contemporary Jewish thinking in a theological and political context. An extensive and detailed source of information on the varieties of Jewish thinking influencing contemporary Judaism and the modern State of Israel, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Jewish Studies, as well as Religion and Politics.

This book examines the thought and legacy of Rabbi Loew (the Maharal), one of the most important Jewish thinkers. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the book encompasses organized perspectives that range from East European cultural and intellectual history, to Medieval Jewish intellectual history and its legacies, to Rabbinic theology, to Italian Jewish history, to Early Modern Jewish intellectual history, to Maharal Studies, to Postmodernism and Judaism, to Jewish political theory, Comparative Religion, and Cinematic Studies.

An exploration of central aspects of Sephardic-Mizrahi rabbinic creativity in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria and Egypt from 1850 to 1950).

Finalist for the American Jewish Studies cateogry of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards Early in the 1800s, American Jews consciously excluded rabbinic forces from playing a role in their community's development. By the final decades of the century, ordained rabbis were in full control of America's leading synagogues and large sectors of American Jewish life. How did this shift occur? Who Rules the Synagogue? explores how American Jewry in the nineteenth century was transformed from a lay dominated community to one whose leading religious authorities were rabbis. Zev Eleff traces the history of this revolution, culminating in the Pittsburgh rabbinical conference of 1885 and the commotion caused by it. Previous scholarship has chartered the religious history of American Judaism during this era, but Eleff reinterprets this history through the lens of religious authority. In so doing, he offers a fresh view of the story of American Judaism with the aid of never-before-mined sources and a comprehensive review of periodicals and newspapers. Eleff weaves together the significant episodes and debates that shaped American Judaism during this formative period, and places this story into the larger context of American religious history and modern Jewish history.

The last in a series of three volumes edited by Marc Lee Raphael surveying some of the major rabbinic and lay personalities who have shaped Judaism in America for the past two centuries, this work focuses on Orthodox Judaism. Along with a basic description of the achievements of some of the most notable leaders, a bibliography of their writings and sources for further study is included as well as an essay on Orthodox rabbinic organizations and a survey of American Orthodox periodicals. Of interest to scholars, students, and lay persons alike, this volume will inform readers about the earliest communities of Jews who settled in America as they developed the institutions of Orthodox Jewish life and set a public standard of compliance with Jewish law. These early American Jews followed a Spanish-Dutch version of Sephardic customs and rites. Their synagogues used traditional prayer books, promoted the celebration of Jewish holidays, established mikvahs, acquired Passover provisions, and arranged for cemetery land and burial services. While many of these Sephardic immigrants did not maintain halakha in their daily regimen as did their European counterparts, they set a public standard of compliance with Jewish law, thus honoring Jewish tradition. Further immigration of thousands of Jews from Western and Central Europe in the middle of the 19th century brought a world of traditional piety and extensive Jewish learning to America, exemplified by Rabbi Abraham Rice, who served in Baltimore, and Yissachar Dov (Bernard) Illowy, who served communities from Philadelphia to New Orleans. Such men marked the beginning of a learned and scholarly rabbinate in America. This volume provides valuable biographical insights regarding some of the most notable religious leaders in American Orthodoxy.

BACHYE’S “Guide to the Duties of the Heart” is the unique work that first linked the ethical science of the West with the emotional and spiritual morality of the East. It combines, in an artistic unity, elements drawn from the philosophy and contemplative mysticism of the Arabs, from Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism, and from Greek thought. By exhibiting the spiritual foundations of universal Ethics, and of the moral law of the Bible, in the light of pure reason, Bachye prepared the way for finding that common ground on which, wholly or in part, all the moral religions, and all the non religious systems of morality, are rooted. Therefore, although actually written in Spain, a land of the West, it forms a fitting opening volume for the “Wisdom of the East Series.” Only a small part of the original finds a place in the following pages; but I have in my translation—sometimes literal, now and again a summarised —endeavoured to give a selection of passages connected by the author’s central thought, and showing his line of argument and the aim and spirit of his work, instead of a mere collection of pithy sayings and isolated, beautiful, but disconnected reflections. This was the only way of doing justice to an author, some of whose reasonings are out of date, but the spirit of whose main contention is eternally valid; a teacher of virtue and duty, who did not attempt to inculcate this or that individual virtue, but aimed at the formation of character and conditions in which right conduct would be inevitable, so that details might well be left to take care of themselves. If the modern world owes its delight in physical beauty, and much of its sense of the true in Nature and in Art, to Greece; its ideal of goodness, and practically all the spiritual elements in our thought and feeling, our conception of holiness, and every moral characteristic of civilisation and of culture, have come to us from the Orient. For the form and system of Ethics we may be indebted to the few Hellenic thinkers whose sublime intellects raised them above the phenomenal world into a clear atmosphere of ideas, always suffused with the light of truth and justice; but all the permanent and vital contents of Ethics came, living and pulsating, with their vitalising possibilities, both into that atmosphere and into our life of to-day, with the glow of dawn from the East. Indeed, the two cardinal ideas essential to all present and future moral systems—the sanctity of human life as such, and the absolutely universal authority and validity of moral law and obligation—are entirely absent from even the writings of Plato, the greatest of the Greeks. These two are among the most definite colours that the prism of modern thought has enabled us to single out in our perception of the pure white light, from the sun of righteousness, that shone on Sinai. They are specially characteristic of the Hebrew moral teaching which the three great religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islamism—have spread throughout the world.