Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology » (New Edition)

Michael Fishbane is the Nathan Cummings Professor of Jewish Studies in the Divinity School and a member of the Committee on Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking.

Contemporary theology, and Jewish theology in particular, Michael Fishbane asserts, now lies fallow, beset by strong critiques from within and without. For Jewish reality, a coherent and wide-ranging response in thoroughly modern terms is needed. Sacred Attunement is Fishbane’s attempt to renew Jewish theology for our time, in the larger context of modern and postmodern challenges to theology and theological thought in the broadest sense.
The first part of the book regrounds theology in this setting and opens up new pathways through nature, art, and the theological dimension as a whole. In the second section, Fishbane introduces his hermeneutical theology—one grounded in the interpretation of scripture as a distinctly Jewish practice. The third section focuses on modes of self-cultivation for awakening and sustaining a covenant theology. The final section takes up questions of scripture, authority, belief, despair, and obligation as theological topics in their own right.
The first full-scale Jewish theology in America since Abraham J. Heschel’s God in Search of Man and the first comprehensive Jewish philosophical theology since Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Sacred Attunement is a work of uncommon personal integrity and originality from one of the most distinguished scholars of Judaica in our time.

Preface     ix
Toward Theology     1
Rethinking Theology: Some Preliminary Considerations     1
Three Domains of Human Being     15
From General to Jewish Theology     39
A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology     46
Sinai and Torah     46
Torah and Hermeneutical Theology     62
PaRDeS     102
Religious Practice and Forms of Attention     108
Preliminary Thoughts about Living Theologically     108
The Practice of Halakha     114
The Life of Prayer     129
The Process of Study     146
Radical Kindness     151
Forms of Thought and Living Theology     156
Scripture as the Ground of Life and Thought     156
Emunah and Theological Integrity     164
Futility and the Sense of Hevel     172
Be-khol Atar ve-Atar: Central Places     176
Toward a Theology of Hiyyuv     191
"In the cranny of the rock, in the hiddenness"     200
Sof ve-Ein Sof: Finitude and Infinity     201
Epilogue     206
Acknowledgments     211
Notes     213
Index     233