Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust

This work is based upon the 1989 Sherman lectures given at Manchester University's Comparative Religion Department. It examines the often bewildering diversity of post-Holocaust Jewish thought on the central terms of Judaic existence, the problems of suffering, the meaning of redemption, the nature of exile, the concept of a covenantal people, the character of Jewish law, the ideas of revelation, tradition and interpretation, and the understanding of providence in relation to covenantal history. This cluster of concepts forms the basis of modern as well as of traditonal theological reflection on the meaning, substance and direction of Jewish life. The study is not a personal statement on the part of the author - rather, it is a thematic survey of Jewish thought over the past half-century, one of the most traumatic and transfigurative periods in the annals of one of the world's most ancient peoples.