Overview

This book reimagines Judaism and Jewish identity after the time-honored method of negative theology. It builds on negations that clear space for revisioning of such topics as creation and revelation, the people and State of Israel, history and suffering, ritual and ethics, God and spiritual life. The theology builds on thought from key figures in the history of Jewish philosophy and serves along the way as an introduction to them, including Ecclesiastes, Philo, Saadia Gaon, Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Nachman Krochmal, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Emil Fackenheim, Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and more. A key finding is that a shared negation binds God and the Jewish people together: their joint refusal to submit to contentful, constrictive definition.

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Reviews

""This brilliant book is about Jewish negative theology. Nothing in Judaism is as it seems: creation is not providential, revelation is not legislative, redemption is not an obvious end of history, God is not personal. The philosophical work of negation rejects the kataphatic message and its simple assertions, but it does not leave us empty-handed. Rubinstein travels the via negativa with his favorite Jewish thinkers, from Ecclesiastes to Levinas, to prove that philosophical Judaism continues to be a vibrant 'live option.'"" --Agata Bielik-Robson, Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Nottingham ""Toward a Negative Theology of Judaism is a sensitive exploration of one of the enduring modes of thinking that has informed Jewish theology and philosophy. Rubinstein deftly points out that the denial of attributing positive characteristics to God opens the way to an alternative form of disclosure of the very being whose nature is beyond our language and comprehension. We are indebted to Rubinstein for gifting us with an aesthetically beautiful exploration of one of the profoundest ways of speaking about God--a speaking that is concurrently a form of not speaking--as the God of whom we speak is decidedly unspeakable. But this is more than a manner of speaking because it is, above all else, a vehicle for encountering and thereby recovering God, a recovery that allows for God's absence of God to serve as the means to attain the divine presence, sometimes hiding in plain sight."" --Elliot R. Wolfson, Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara

Author Information

Ernest Rubinstein is adjunct assistant professor of humanities at New York University's School of Professional Studies. He is author of four previous books, most recently A Liminal Space: Between Judaism and Christianity (2021).

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