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That the God of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, “the God of the Jews,” is perfectly good is challenged by apparently immoral acts of that God, by contemporary standards, as well as by the classic problem of evil. In this book, Jerome Gellman aims to alleviate the first challenge, the so-called ideological critique, for the traditional believer by recommending replacing the God of the Jews with a different God, a “Jewish God,” one in whom many traditional Jews have come to believe. And the problem of evil is lightened for the traditional believer, mainly by a possible theodicy explaining much evil. The book is at once analytic in style and Hasidic in broad orientation.
“The attractive thing about this book is its intellectual humility: the author suggests, he does not insist. For anyone interested in Jewish ideas about God, it will prove a stimulating… read.”
— John Barton, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies
“In this third book in his series on Jewish theology in the modern age, Gellman, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University, continues the adaptations of traditional Jewish responses to the questions surrounding Jewish theology. This book deals with the issue of whether God can be fully ‘good’ given the objections to Biblical texts which portray actions by God that are today held to be immoral. … This book is highly recommended mainly for academic libraries with collections that seek to collect books on Jewish theology, philosophy and ethics.”
—Eli Lieberman, Assistant Librarian, Hebrew Union College, AJL Reviews
Jerome Yehuda Gellman is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Gellman has been a fellow at the Hartman Institute, Jerusalem, at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, and at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He has published widely in the fields of philosophy of religion and Jewish thought.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Forward
Introduction
My Theological Method
A Perfectly Good Being
The God of the Jews
The Ideological Critique
The Argument from Evil
The Humility Response
Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique
Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion of God from Above”
The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy
Backward
Bibliography