Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (1997)

I can't recall exactly how I came to this book. It may have been that by familiarizing myself (a little) with Scholasticism and medieval Muslim explorations of the relationship between revelation and reason, on the one hand, and having some superficial impressions of what I understood to be a Talmudic culture of debate about Biblical interpretation, on the other, I began to wonder just what this Jewish tradition was like, and whether it, perhaps, bore some similarities to the Christian and Muslim scholasticisms. I may have been intrigued, I can't really remember, by the possibility that a tradition had developed a critical tradition on its own, largely without the "outside" impetus of Greek philosophy. I hoped Fisch's book might provide an intellectual prosopography of this tradition. In fact, it was rather different than I had expected, but nonetheless still fascinating. In the first, much shorter part, Fisch, an eminent philosopher of science in his own right, developed a kind of meta-Popperian account of rational projects, a standard independent of the projects' goals. I found this part to be quite persuasive. In the second, much longer, and for me quite challenging part, Fisch tried to show that Talmudic texts contained both traditionalist and antitraditionalist - i.e. critical in the meta-Popperian sense - strands. The persuasiveness of this part I really couldn't judge. The material was simply too dense, and I didn't have the patience to try to follow Fisch's argumentation. So I can't say how rational the rabbis were, though I want to think that Fisch is correct. I did come away struck by just how much of the Talmud dealt with "halahkik" questions, very specific issues of ritual law.

Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People (2024)

I thought I knew the basics, or some of the basics, about the various Jewish denominations today. This deeply thoughtful, nuanced, and humane book taught me otherwise. Not only was I unaware of entire categories of contemporary Judaism (for example, I thought Hasidim were the entirety of ultra-orthodox Judaism [or Haredi], but there are also the Yeshivish, whom I had never heard of before; nor did I know about the Evolutionists or the....). Perhaps even more importantly, I hadn't known about the complex mutations of many of these denominations or of particular beliefs of theirs, especially about Zionism and, later, Israel. I hadn't really understood that the original secular Zionism had wanted a state for the Jews, not a Jewish state - what became Israel was to displace the Jewish religion and make Jews just another "normal" nation. I hadn't known that for Progressive Jews, at least until the last couple of decades, the Holocaust and Israel had been interpreted (un- or subconsciously) in almost christological terms: the Holocaust was the Passion of the Jews, Israel their Resurrection. I hadn't known that Religious Zionism has since the 1990s more or less displaced the original, secular one, even as Israel has become increasingly central to the identities of many Jews in the Diaspora. Or that Jabotinsky, Begin, and Netanyahu also wanted/want to occupy all of Biblical Israel, like the Religious Zionists do, but with a different justification. And I learned much else besides. Feldman expresses opinions about much of this, but he always does so after open-minded, nonjudgmental consideration of the paths different groups of Jews have taken. He unflinchingly addresses uncomfortable questions, like whether Judaism isn't a form of tribalism, or the reasons for Jews' spectacular successes in many fields in the last 150 years. He weaves in parts of his own story, revealing how various encounters shaped his beliefs and even shook them. By the end, I felt I hadn't only learned many particulars but had also gained a deep appreciation of Feldman's own, and more generally, the Jewish people's, "struggles with God together" (which is his concluding definition of what it is to be Jewish).