Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Individual significance
- 2 Self-realization as a religious value
- 3 Attitudes to life and death
- 4 Family relationships
- 5 Loving the neighbour
- 6 Communal obligations
- 7 God and the soul
- 8 Does a person's body belong to God?
- 9 Worship with the body
- 10 God and personal freedom
- 11 Immortality
- 12 Conclusion: A question of emphasis
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Individual significance
- 2 Self-realization as a religious value
- 3 Attitudes to life and death
- 4 Family relationships
- 5 Loving the neighbour
- 6 Communal obligations
- 7 God and the soul
- 8 Does a person's body belong to God?
- 9 Worship with the body
- 10 God and personal freedom
- 11 Immortality
- 12 Conclusion: A question of emphasis
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This book is a study of the role of the individual in religion from the perspective of Judaism. The book has been written in the conviction that both apologists for Judaism and hostile critics have erred in relegating the individual to a less than central place. Most of the material is presented here for the first time except for chapters 7 and 10. An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared in Studies in Rationalism, Judaism and Universalism in Memory of Leon Roth, ed. Raphael Loewe, London, 1966 (‘The Doctrine of the “Divine Spark” in Man in Jewish Sources’, pp. 87–114) and of chapter 10 in the journal Conservative Judaism, 34, September / October, 1980 (‘Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will’, pp. 4–16), for which my thanks are due to the editors. Although, nowadays, especially in the United States, various circumlocutions would be used in writing about the individual so as to avoid the taint of male chauvinism, I find such forms as he/she to be quite unnecessary even in a work about the individual. The individual is referred to in this book in the male form purely out of convention and to avoid an awkward English style.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Religion and the IndividualA Jewish Perspective, pp. xiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992