In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Alabama: University of Alabama Press), 1981, 1-9. The narrative in the twenty-second chapter of the book of Genesis, in which Abraham is instructed by God to offer up his son Isaac as a burnt offering, is known in the Jewish tradition as the Akedah,1…...

Originally published in Masorti Forum, 1. We are all familiar with the well-nigh universal practice by which donors to the synagogue are afforded the honour of having their names displayed prominently as evidence of their generosity for everyone to see and to admire. On the mantle of a Sefer Torah, for example, there can usually…...

Originally published as ‘Current Theological Literature: The Problem of Evil in Our Time’, in Judaism, 17.3 (Summer 1968), 347-51. It is generally acknowledged in contemporary theological discussion that while the terrible problem of how God, the all-good and all-powerful, can tolerate evil in His creation, has always been the most stubborn the theist has to…...

Originally published in European Judaism 2: 1 (1967). The distinguished theologian, Rabbi Dr. I. Maybaum, for whom this volume is a tribute, can hardly be said to be well disposed towards Jewish mysticism. In his ‘The Face of God after Auschwitz’ he takes me to task for publishing my translation of the mystical text ‘Tract…...

THE MASORTI ASSOCIATION LECTURE 9th January 1983 at the London Business School First published by: The Masorti Association 33 Abbey Road London N.W.8. Copyright Louis Jacobs 1983   I consider it a privilege and an honour to have been invited to give the first Masorti lecture. I have called this lecture the Philosophy of the…...

Originally published in Reuben Ahroni, ed., Hebrew Annual Review 7: Biblical and other studies in honor of Robert Gordis (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 1983), 137-49. Republished in L. Jacobs, Rabbinic thought in the Talmud (London; Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), 55-67.   Robert Gordis (1971. pp. 95-103) has demonstrated the use of the heptad…...

A continuation of Rabbi Jacobs’ article THE NATURE OF HASIDIC PRAYER Excerpt from Hasidic Prayer (1972) Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books. Published by Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. In a book published in Altona as early as 1768, only eight years after the death of the Baal Shem Tov, the fiery…...

Excerpt from Hasidic Prayer by Louis Jacobs (1972) Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books. Published by Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. An early hasidic text, speaking of the dialogue of the Baal Shem Tov (d. 1760), the founder of the hasidic movement, with his own soul, remarks: [1] ‘The soul declared to…...

Originally published: Paris, Community (late 1950s – early 1960s)   If one of our ancestors were to come back to earth today the thing that would strike him most about modern living would be its comprehensiveness. Distances have been annihilated by the automobile, the railway train, the ocean liner and the aeroplane. Popular education has…...

Originally published in Venture, 1, 4 (April 1957). A week or two ago I received a letter from a friend, describing Synagogal life in Toronto, where he resides. ‘Last Friday night (he writes) commenced the first in a series of ‘Week-ends with Great Jews.’ It seems that in the past the Rabbi has arranged for…...

1979, New School for Social Research As the reader may recall, I had occasion during this past semester to be in London, England. While there, I visited The Leo Baeck College for Rabbinical Studies, and at my request Rabbi Albert Friedlander, Dean of Rabbinical Studies, set up an appointment for me to visit Rabbi Louis…...

Originally published in Religion in Today’s World: The Religious Situation of the World from 1945 to the Present Day, ed. Frank Whaling, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1987   The two events which transformed Jewish thought and life in the period from 1947 to the present day were the destruction of six million Jews—a third of the…...

Originally published in Journal of Sex Education, 2: 4 (1950), 177. The sources in the earlier halakhah from which a ruling on the question of artificial insemination can be extracted are by their very nature few. There are some references in the Talmud to an unmarried woman becoming pregnant after bathing in a bath in…...

Originally published in the Jewish Chronicle   MANY ORTHODOX rabbis – it is safe to assume – will devote their sermons on Shavuot, the season of the giving of the Torah, to the theme of Torah min hashamayim, “Torah from Heaven.” They will bravely denounce any view other than that the doctrine means that every…...

Originally published in Journal of Semitic Studies, 2: 4 (1957), 349-59. A baraita [2] records that ‘ten measures of poverty descended into the world, nine of them were taken by Babylon’. There is the further statement of R. Asi [3] that the festivals are celebrated with great joy in Babylon as a compensation for the…...

The Rabbi Louis Feinberg Memorial Lecture, 1978 Published by the Judaic Studies Program, University of Cincinnati   R. Elimelech of Lizensk (1717-87), disciple of the Meseritcher Maggid, is famous in the history of Hasidism as the father of the Galician branch of the movement and as the author of the hasidic classic, Noam Elimelekh (The…...

Originally published in Studies in Rationalism, Judaism and Universalism, ed. Raphael Loewe (Humanities: 1966), 87-114. The belief that there is a special mystical ‘spark’ in every human breast can be traced back, in western mysticism, at least to Jerome in the fourth century. Both Bonaventura and Bernard of Clairvaux speak of this mystical organ; the…...

Originally published in Conservative Judaism 33/2 (Winter 1980), 18-28. This article was delivered as a paper to a conference organized by the International Jewish Consultation on Interreligious Concerns and the World Council of Churches.   An examination of the concept of power in the Jewish tradition must draw on the classical sources of Judaism, particularly…...

Originally published in Journal of Jewish Studies 8, 3 (1957), 143-154. While the concept of hasid as it appears in the literature concerning the hasidim of Ashkenaz, and more particularly of Beshtian Hasidism, has received more or less adequate treatment, no attempt has hitherto been made to trace the evolution of the term in the…...

Published in Whitfield Foy, ed., Man’s Religious Quest (Croom Helm: London, 1978) Original source: Louis Jacobs, A Jewish Theology (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973), 269-75. In view of the importance the doctrine of Israel as God’s chosen people assumes in the Bible, its central role in rabbinic thought and the emphasis placed upon it by…...