Imagining the Jewish God

Leonard Kaplan, Ken Koltun-Fromm

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9798216272021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism

Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book—a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the "text" as foundational for the imagined "people of the book." That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Imagining the Jewish God
• Part I. PROLOGUE: INSCRIPTION
• Chapter One. On the Poetics of the Jewish God
• Chapter Two. Seeing Divine Writing: Thoughts on the Drama of the Outside Within the Technology of Inscription
• Chapter Three. Questions Posed to Jonathan Boyarin
• Part II. OUT OF LEVANT: BIBLICAL AND RABBINIC IMAGININGS OF GOD
• Chapter Four. Classical Jewish Ethics and Theology in the Halakhic Tractates of the Mishnah
• Chapter Five. What the Hebrew Bible Can/Cannot Teach Us about God
• Chapter Six. The Bible as Torah: How J, E, P, and D Can Teach Us about God
• Chapter Seven. Job, the Levantine Book: A Beginning Guide through Human Perplexity
• Chapter Eight. Job: Two Endings, Three Openings
• Part III. CLINGING TO GOD: THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
• Chapter Nine. The Repersonalization of God: Monism and Theological Polymorphism in Zoharic and Hasidic Imagination
• Chapter Ten. The Word of God Is No Word at All: Intimacy and the Nothingness of God
• Chapter Eleven. Who Is God?
• Chapter Twelve. Jewish Theology and the Transcendental Turn
• Chapter Thirteen. The Perils of Covenant Theology: The Cases of David Hartman and David Novak
• Chapter Fourteen. Freud’s Imagining God
• Part IV. INSCRIPTION: GOD IN JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
• Chapter Fifteen. God of Language
• Chapter Sixteen. Location, Location, Location: Toward a Theology of Prepositions
• Chapter Seventeen. Rethinking Milton’s Hebraic God
• Chapter Eighteen. Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d
• Chapter Nineteen. “Don’t Forget the Potatoes”: Imagining God Through Food
• Chapter Twenty. Imagining the Jewish God in Comics
• Part V. POETICS: GOD IN LANGUAGE
• Chapter Twenty-One. God’s Inside/The Line of a Poem: A Philosophical Commentary
• Chapter Twenty-Two. Reconciling God, Revisioning Prayer, and Reaching into the Spaces Between in Selected Works by Alicia Ostriker, Marcia Falk, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis
• Chapter Twenty-Three. Unimagining the Jewish God (Remix)
• Chapter Twenty-Four. Poems and Commentary
• Chapter Twenty-Five. Poems
• Chapter Twenty-Six. Parables and Commentary
• Chapter Twenty-Seven. Poems and Commentary
• Chapter Twenty-Eight. Poems
• Chapter Twenty-Nine. Poems
• Chapter Thirty. Poems
• Chapter Thirty-One. Poems
• Chapter Thirty-Two. Poems from The Days Between
• Chapter Thirty-Three. Poems and Prose
• Chapter Thirty-Four. Poems
• Chapter Thirty-Five. Poems
• Chapter Thirty-Six. Poems and Commentary
• Chapter Thirty-Seven. Poems
• Index
• About the Contributors