Known most widely for his 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. Heschel's great insight is that the world of rabbinic thought can be divided into two types or schools, those of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, and that the historic disputes between the two are based on fundamental differences over the nature of revelation and religion. Furthermore, this disagreement constitutes a basic and necessary 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. "This is a splendid translation of a pivotal work. Tucker and Levin make the intricacies of Heschel's thoughts understandable to the reader." -"Shamash Book of the Month, "July 2006"I think of Torah Min Hashamayim, Abraham Joshua Heschel's work on Rabbinic Theology, as an unfinished symphony. This work is like a symphony with many movements. Heschel's book is never explicitly polemical, but it nevertheless remains a passionate protest against both rigid literalists of Torah and those on the other side who dismiss the Torah as if it were only poetry. Torah Min Hashamayim is many things: a dazzling work of scholarship in Rabbinic Literature, a portrait of the tension between two differing world views, and more. Gordon Tucker is to be appreciated for having undertaken this incredibly difficult work of translation and for having done it as well as it can be done." - "San Diego Jewish Journal", December 2005"In order to understand the outsized public personality of Heschel, it is essential to appreciate the underlying source of his passions; that is, the Jewish tradition as it developed from its scriptures. And no where are these sources better revealed than in "Heavenly Torah. "It is precisely because he was anchored in a received tradition, with all of its particularities, that he can be a figure of universal importance."- Matthew LaGrone, "Touchstone, "January 2007 Vol. 25 No. 1--Sanford Lakoff"Torah from Heaven," a curious translation of Heschel's original three volumes "Torah Min Hashamayim" or in his alternate English, "The Theology of Ancient Judaism," is, perhaps, his masterpiece. Published over many years in Hebrew, it has now been made available in clear, idiomatic English (Continuum, 2005). Heschel once told me, with his uniquely accurate and typical exaggeration, that every word he wrote was a quotation form classical Jewish literature. This book comes close to being exactly that. It is an anthology of viewpoints clustered in two posing constellations... In the 42 years since the first volume of the Hebrew original of Torah Min Hashamayim appeared we have had time to consider the meaning of Rabbi Heschel's monumental study of rabbinic dualism. Can the school of Akiba and that of Ishma'el be ultimately reconciled? Can a Hegelian synthesis be accomplished? Does Heschel himself prefer one of the schools to the other? We might have expected that he would incline to the mystical-transcendent pole, but that does not seem to be the case. Indeed, he is most eloquent expounding the human aspect of Torah... Gordon Tucker (and Leonard Levin) have done a superb job of assembling, editing, abridging, and translating a huge, not quite-finished manuscript. Others literally died trying to translate this sprawling masterpiece. There may be some dissent from the inevitable emissions, some few typos, some doubts about Tucker's interpretations. But on the whole, the introductions to each chapter, the explanatory notes on alm
- Libro Impreso
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- Editorial: Vintage
- Autor: Heschel, Abraham Joshua
