Reviews for Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew

The average rating for Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-26 00:00:00 William Madden All forms of Judaism, says Borowitz, believe in transcendent divine truths alongside the meaning-making abilities of humans. The driving question here is how much weight should be given to each side. Orthodoxies tend to lean toward God while non-Orthodoxies tend to empower humans. To allow the answer to emerge solely from a religious or a secular source is to beg the question. An answer must be arrived at through the lens of both Judaism and the surrounding culture (in this case, Western rationalist philosophy), since the culture helps make Judaism what it is. How we grapple with evil is one of the major issues discussed in this book. How do we evaluate right from wrong? Early 20th-century Jews placed their hope in reason, progress, and secular ethics. The experience of the Holocaust damaged this trust in humanity. Especially because of the Holocaust (and also due to general moral failings of "democratic capitalism"), it seems to Borowitz that "a critical pillar of modernism collapsed: the belief that secular enlightenment would make people ethically self-correcting." (p. 21) Post-Holocaust spiritual movements have attempted to locate "a sure ground of human values" to satisfy our "unshakable demand for value at the heart of the universe." Everyone must insist on maintaining the ability to distinguish evildoers from their victims. This search to define the source of ethics is basically a search for God, but modern Jews want this search to be "realistic." (pp. 42-43) Can we rely on mystic union with God as the centerpiece of religion? Not really, he says. One limitation of mysticism is that few claim to have had this experience, and the experience is always private and subjective by its nature. If the "standard of value remains what transpires in the unio mystica," and if there is no appeal to reason nor to "a self with sufficient independent authority to occasionally act as a guide or brake on our mystic experience," then dialogue becomes impossible, and "the only way to settle a difference is for one to leave and start another community." If it is difficult for Orthodoxy to ground its moral authority, how much more so for mysticism. (pp. 90-91) Another major issue he tackles is the idea that Jews are God's "chosen people." Recognizing the danger of racism and ethnocentrism inherent in such an assumption, Borowitz nevertheless wants to maintain Jewish "particularity." In his preface, he says that God has a small-c covenant with humanity and a big-C Covenant with the Jews. Elsewhere, he says: "I do not have a relationship with God as a person-in-general but as a result of my specific human particularity as a Jew. Directly put, I share in the people of Israel's corporate Covenant with God and my fervent universalism grows directly out of that particularity." (p. 31) Accepting that Judaism is an important category, he discusses the challenge of defining exactly what anchors it. Ethnicity seems insufficient, as are events that concern the Jews, such as the Holocaust or the founding of the State of Israel. If you often read academic theology, the language here is probably fine for you. I hadn't read such material in a while, and I had to reread every paragraph. Here's an example. Rather than stating simply that art and literature do not always give advice on how to live and that artists and writers and not always good people, he wrote two pages sounding like this: "…some have suggested that the one effective element in our religious lives is its aesthetic appeal….A moment's reflection quickly indicates that beauty does not obligate and elegant sensibility can be characterologically inconsequential. Anthony Blunt could simultaneously be the Queen of England's art historian and a traitor." (p. 86) It's figureoutable, but it takes effort to slog through it. Borowitz died three years ago at age 91. Page numbers are from the 1996 Jewish Publication Society paperback.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-01-22 00:00:00 Ralph Briscoe Borowitz asks some interesting questions and he begins the discussion of looking at Judaism from a Postmodern lens. However, Borowitz merely begins. He is too wedded to universalism and modernity to do the necessary deconstruction.