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Dr. Reuven Kimelman
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Abraham Joshua Heschel's
Thesis on the Unity of
Jewish Theology
by Reuven Kimelman
While much has been said of Abraham Joshua Heschel's religious genius and moral courage, more needs to be said about his intellectual audacity. He claims to have traced the continuum of Jewish religious consciousness from the Biblical and Rabbinic periods through the Kabbalistic and Hasidic ones. Heschel argued that these periods are unified by the theme of God's concern for humanity. The different expressions of Judaism are not mutually exclusive, but rather moments in the dialectic of humanity's encounter with God. Where others saw dichotomies, he saw polarities. Our inclination to understand Judaism or to approach the divine through only one of the poles leaves us, according to Heschel, with partial understandings of Judaism and fragmentary visions of the divine. In contrast, Heschel's theology offers a historical and conceptual framework for maintaining the dialectic without reducing one pole to the other.
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Whether you explore the general purpose article in Tikkun Magazine, or the expanded article in The Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy, or both, I hope you'll find Dr. Kimelman's articles enjoyable, informative and insightful.
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