The Transformation Of Judaism

An eminent scholar of the history of Judaism, Jacob Neusner shows in this work how Judaism changed from a philosophy to a religion between 200 and 400 C.E. 'The Transformation of Judaism' is a work both revolutionary in its method and unprecedented in its results. Comparing earlier and later sets of Judaic writings, Neusner sets forth how philosophy - abstract, elegant, orderly, and intellectual - turned into religion - tangible, down-to-earth, chaotic, and concrete. In the process, he offers an account of the birth of Judaism that has become normative. Moreover, Neusner's methodology can be applied to the study of religions other than Judaism because it examines the underpinnings of how a society sees the world (philosophy), orders itself (politics), and sustains itself (economics).

Examines how Jewish society, politics, and culture have changed during the past two centuries and describes how modernization and widespread emigration affected the Jewish community

Spiritual transformation is the process of changing one's beliefs, values, attitudes, and everyday behaviors related to a transcendent experience or higher power. Jewish adults who adopt Orthodoxy provide a clear example of spiritual transformation within a religious context. With little prior exposure to traditional practice, these baalei teshuvah (literally, "masters of return" in Hebrew) turn away from their former way of life, take on strict religious obligations, and intensify their spiritual commitment. This book examines the process of adopting Orthodox Judaism and the extensive life changes that are required. Based on forty-eight individual interviews as well as focus groups and interviews with community outreach leaders, it uses psychological developmental theory and the concept of socialization to understand this journey. Roberta G. Sands examines the study participants' family backgrounds, initial explorations, decisions to make a commitment, spiritual struggles, and psychological and social integration. The process is at first exciting, as baalei teshuvah make new discoveries and learn new practices. Yet after commitment and immersion in an Orthodox community, they face challenges furthering their education, gaining cultural knowledge, and raising a family without parental role models. By showing how baalei teshuvah integrate their new understandings of Judaism into their identities, Sands provides fresh insight into a significant aspect of contemporary Orthodoxy.

Demonstates through different essays Jewish Womens movement rides the fine line between tradition and transformation.

Jacob Neusner describes, analyzes, and interprets the transformation of one system of the Israelite social order by a connected but autonomous successor-system. He characterizes the successive systems classifying the one as philosophical and the other as religious. He explains the categorical account of each and sets forth the outcome of a number of topical studies on the category-formations of Rabbinic Judaism with special attention to the social order: politics, philosophy, and economics. These systems emerged as [1] autonomous when viewed synchronically, [2] connected when seen diachronically, and [3] as a continuous construction when seen at the end of their formative age. In their successive stages of categorical autonomy, connection, and finally continuity, the three distinct systems may be classified, respectively, as philosophical, religious, and theological, each one taking over and revising the definitive categories of the former and framing its own fresh, generative categories as well. The formative history of Judaism is the story of the presentations and re-presentations of categorical structures. In method, it is the exegesis of taxonomy and taxic systems. Now, after more than two decades, Neusner has decided to review the initial statement. Since the book summarizes ten years of work, from 1980 to 1990, on the Rabbinic category formations of social science politics, philosophy, and economics in the setting of the law and theology of Rabbinic Judaism from the Mishnah through the Bavli, 200-600 C.E., it seemed well worth the effort to recapitulate the original work. The revised introduction explains the omission of theology in his category-formation philosophy-religion-theology; Neusner's account of the Bavli produced the decade after this title was completed did not make possible the continuous description of the unfolding of the Rabbinic system. The pattern that appealed to Neusner from philosophy to religion to theology has not yet come to a satisfactory account. In the twenty years of work on the third layer of the canon up to the Bavli, a series of monographs clarified the theological system that sustained Rabbinic Judaism.

In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Christian scholars portrayed Judaism as the dark religious backdrop to the liberating events of Jesus' life and the rise of the early church. Since the 1950s, however, a dramatic shift has occurred in the study of Judaism, driven by new manuscript and archaeological discoveries and new methods and tools for analyzing sources. George Nickelsburg here provides a broad and synthesizing picture of the results of the past fifty years of scholarship on early Judaism and Christianity. He organizes his discussion around a number of traditional topics: scripture and tradition, Torah and the righteous life, God's activity on humanity's behalf, agents of God's activity, eschatology, historical circumstances, and social settings. Each of the chapters discusses the findings of contemporary research on early Judaism, and then sketches the implications of this research for a possible reinter-pretation of Christianity. Still, in the author's view, there remains a major Jewish-Christian agenda yet to be developed and implemented.

According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution designed by God for the children of Israel. Newly available rabbinic materials became authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of the perfect republic. This thinking resulted in a sweeping reorientation of political commitments. In the book’s central chapters, Nelson identifies three transformative claims introduced into European political theory by the Hebrew revival: the argument that republics are the only legitimate regimes; the idea that the state should coercively maintain an egalitarian distribution of property; and the belief that a godly republic would tolerate religious diversity. One major consequence of Nelson’s work is that the revolutionary politics of John Milton, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes appear in a brand-new light. Nelson demonstrates that central features of modern political thought emerged from an attempt to emulate a constitution designed by God. This paradox, a reminder that while we may live in a secular age, we owe our politics to an age of religious fervor, in turn illuminates fault lines in contemporary political discourse.