Overview

Holy, holy, holy! The Lord of hosts! The fill of all the earth is His glory. In these few ecstatic words, the prophet Isaiah captured the core of Jewish thinking about humanity, nature, and God. If the idea of holiness generally points toward God's transcendence, Isaiah brings it back down to earth, recognizing God's presence throughout the world. The Holy One of Israel is a philosophical exploration of that remarkable and distinctively Jewish idea: that God is everywhere, yet not in space. Lenn Goodman explores what can be meant by God's uniqueness, presence, and perfection. In a text richly resonant with the classic Jewish sources and in dialogue with the great philosophers, Goodman probes the ideas of revelation, natural law, the problem of evil, the challenges and limits of the idea of God's transcendence, and God's actions in and through nature, including human nature. This book is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in how our ideas about God can inform our lives and our thinking about individual and social responsibility and intellectual and artistic creativity and spiritual growth.

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9780190698508

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Reviews

The Holy One of Israel is Goodman's most compelling statement yes of his thesis that God and the Good are coextensive. God is the source of goodness we experience as recipients of the gift of being and of life and mind far beyond our prior deserts. And God is the standard whose goodness we are called to emulate and whose presence and sovereignty in the world we are called to strengthen. In its scope, ambition, and intellectual heft, dexterity, and vision, this work is nothing less than a twenty-first century Guide for the Perplexed. Jewish philosophy will never be the same. -- Alan Mittleman, Aaron Rabinowitz and Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Jewish Philosophy, The Jewish Theological Seminary The voice of the prophet is not stilled to this day. In this work, Lenn Goodman synthesizes piety and poetry, theology and ethics, in a most compelling way. It is in God's loving-kindness and creatures' response that Goodman finds the biblical key to both religion and science, personal virtue and the evolution of the natural world. The result is a unified Judaic field theory in the tradition of Maimonides and Spinoza, an extraordinary achievement relevant to anyone concerned with truth, goodness and beauty. -- Timothy P. Jackson, Professor of Christian Ethics, Candler School of Theology, Emory University This vitally important book masterfully integrates Torah and logos, mind and character, poetry and science--really, all of the fundamental dimensions of human experience--as it illuminates the unity of transcendence and immanence in the Judaic God. More than nourishment for the intellect, The Holy One of Israel buoyed and invigorated this reader's heart. -- Jacob Howland, author of Plato and the Talmund

Author Information

Lenn E. Goodman is the author of several works on Jewish philosophy, including Judaism, Human Rights, and Human Values, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy, and Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation. He is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

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