This book had its origins in the 1989 Sherman Lectures given at Manchester University’s Department of Comparative Religion. In it I analyse the often bewildering diversity of post-Holocaust Jewish thought on the central terms of Judaic existence: the problem 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 traditional theological reflection on the meaning, substance and direction of Jewish life.

But as will quickly become clear, the second half of the twentieth century has given these subjects direct, even epic, existential relevance. The questions posed by modern Jewish thought do not arise in metaphysical abstraction. The problem of suffering is raised by the Holocaust. The concept of redemption is tested against the modern State of Israel. The meaning of exile is challenged by the contemporary European and American diaspora. Rarely has Jewish thought had such urgent dialogue with Jewish existence.

The present study is not a personal statement. 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. Such a survey, I believe, is important. Studies of modern Jewish thought hitherto have tended to concentrate on figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the neglect of the present. In addition they have largely focused on non-Orthodox thinkers, thus obscuring the intense inner dialectic within Orthodoxy itself. Moreover the Holocaust and the State of Israel have changed the direction of Jewish concern. The context of Jewish thought today is not what it was a century ago. Then, thinkers were largely engaged with the question of how to translate a religion of revelation into the Kantian language of rationalism and universalism. Now they ask more direct questions about Jewry as a particular, covenantal people whose recent history has had an almost biblical quality. In the midst of a secular age, the prophetic themes of collective suffering and providence, exodus and homecoming, have for Jews become immediately real.

I have attempted to give the broadest possible picture of contemporary Jewish thought. I have thus set forth, among others, views with which I profoundly disagree. In some cases I have subjected them to a critique, but not in all. In general, I have tried to avoid apologetics and special pleading. One of the undeniable features of modern Jewry has been its deep fragmentation, unprecedented since second Temple times. From the first to the late eighteenth centuries, Jews were subject to internal differences, inevitable in a living tradition sustained by a dispersed people. But one could still speak of a single tradition. For beneath the differences was underlying agreement on the fundamentals of Jewish faith and on Jewish law as the constitution of a holy people. Today that agreement is ostensibly absent. A portrait of the state of Jewish thought that did not do justice to its radical conflicts would be altogether misleading.

On each topic I have set recent Jewish reflection against a dual background, the biblical and rabbinic tradition on the one hand, the sociological realities of contemporary Jewry on the other. In this way I have tried to give full weight to the intense drama of the collision between tradition and modernity, and to focus on what I see as the central theological challenge of Jewish life: the continuation of the covenant through the discontinuities of time.

The time I spent in Manchester while delivering the Sherman Lectures was a delight. The members of the University Department of Comparative Religion were warm and welcoming, astute and challenging. The lecture audiences were wonderfully receptive. And the Manchester Jewish community, at events organised to coincide with my visit, was a model of hospitality. My thanks go to Professor John Hinnells, Head of the Department, for extending the invitation to deliver the lectures; to Dr Philip Alexander for acting most graciously as my host; to Professor A. O. Dyson, Dr Alan Unterman and Mr L. S. Cousins of the University faculty; and to Sir Sidney Hamburger on behalf of the Manchester Jewish community. I owe to each of them warm memories of intellectual stimulus and, above all, friendship.

Thanks, too, are due to Dayan Isaac Berger, Dayan Berel Berkovits, Rabbi Ivan Binstock, Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu and Mr Bobby Hill, who read the text in manuscript and alerted me to several infelicities of expression and construction. The thoughts expressed in the book and the errors that remain are, of course, my own.

J. S.

-1992