How the rabbis of the Talmud transformed Jewish law into a way of thinking and talking about everything Typically translated as "Jewish law," halakhah is not an easy match for what is usually thought of as law. This is because the rabbinic legal system has rarely wielded the political power to enforce its rules, nor has it ever been the law of any state. Even more idiosyncratically, the talmudic rabbis claim the study of halakhah is a holy endeavor that brings a person closer to God—a claim no country makes of its law. Chaim Saiman traces how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. Guiding readers across two millennia of richly illuminating perspectives, this panoramic book shows how halakhah is not just "law" but an entire way of thinking, being, and knowing.

Coherent Judaism begins by excavating the theologies within the Torah and tracing their careers through the Jewish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Any compelling, contemporary Judaism must cohere as much as possible with traditional Judaism and everything else we believe to be true about our world. The challenge is that over the past two centuries, our understandings of both the Torah and nature have radically changed. Nevertheless, much Jewish wisdom can be translated into a contemporary idiom that both coheres with all that we believe and enriches our lives as individuals and within our communities. Coherent Judaism explains why pre-modern Judaism opted to privilege consensus around Jewish behavior (halakhah) over belief. The stresses of modernity have conspired to reveal the incoherence of that traditional approach. In our post-Darwinian and post-Holocaust world, theology must be able to withstand the challenges of science and history. Traditional Jewish theologies have the resources to meet those challenges. Coherent Judaism concludes by presenting a philosophy of halakhah that is faithful to the covenantal aspiration to live long on the land that the Lord, our God, has given us.

Neusner proves that the law of normative Judaism, the Halakhah, viewed whole, with its category-formations read in logical sequence, tells a coherent story. He demonstrates that details of the law contribute to making a single statement, one that, moreover, complements and corresponds with that of the Aggadah, the lore and scriptural exegesis of Judaism. He has now portrayed for the first time the way in which Aggadah and Halakhah, attitude and action, belief and behavior, join together to set forth normative Judaism, the vast system for holy Israel's social order of the Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash of late antiquity.

Why did the Gentile church keep Old Testament commandments about sex and idolatry, but disregard many others, like those about food or ritual purity? If there were any binding norms, what made them so, and on what basis were they articulated?In this important study, Markus Bockmuehl approaches such questions by examining the halakhic (Jewish legal) rationale behind the ethics of Jesus, Paul and the early Christians. He offers fresh and often unexpected answers based on careful biblical and historical study. His arguments have far-reaching implications not only for the study of the New Testament, but more broadly for the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.

The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology offers an overview of Jewish theology, an aspect of Judaism that is equal in importance to law and ethics. Covering the period from antiquity to the present, the volume focuses on what Jews believe about God and also about the relation of God to humans and the world. Parts I and II cover exciting new research in Jewish biblical and rabbinic theology, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah (mysticism), and liturgy. Parts III and IV turn to modern theology with an exploration of works by leading figures, such as Rabbi Abraham I. Kook, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the relation of theology to issues such as feminism and the Holocaust, and the relation of Judaism to other world religions. In Part V, the book explores how the insights of analytic philosophy have been integrated with Jewish theology.

A Jewish Public Theology draws from Halakhah, Jewish law, to address some of the most searing current policy issues. Abraham Unger examines how Jewish tradition speaks to globalization and its attendant political and economic cleavages. Classical Jewish thought sits on a perch outside of the defining parameters of the global political conversation and as such cannot be pigeon holed as populist, leftist, or rightist. Judaism was born in antiquity and therefore predates by millennia these current ideological biases. That intellectual distance, both due to the long arc of Jewish history, and outsider minority status as a tradition, allows for a critical distance. Unger explores how the Jewish tradition compels the living out of a public policy framework through the forging of equitable communities using arguments that go beyond political orthodoxies. In this socially fragile era, the possibility of that message offers a hopeful discourse of significant possibility for all humankind.