Elliot N. Dorff: In Search of the Good Life PDF Download

Author: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004279024
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, the Sol and Anne Dorff Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Rector of American Jewish University in Los Angeles, is one of today’s leading Jewish ethicists. In Search of a Good Life presents influential essays by Dorff and explains his contribution to Jewish religious thought in the second half of the 20th century.

Author: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900438121X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This anthology reflects on the future of Jewish philosophy in light of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers (Brill, 2013-2018). The essays assess the academic contribution and cultural importance of Jewish philosophy and offer paths for its future growth.

Author:
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
ISBN: 9780827610224
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
This book discusses modern medical ethical dilemas from a specifically conservative Jewish point of view. The author includes issues such as artifical insemination, genetic engineering, cloning, surrogate motherhood, and birth control, as well as living wills, hospice care, euthanasia, organ donation, and autopsy.

Author: Elliot N. Dorff
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
ISBN: 082760825X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
In this topically relevant book on modern ethical issues, Dorff focuses on personal ethics, Judaism's distinctive way of understanding human nature, our role in life, and what we should strive to be, both as individuals and as members of a community. Dorff addresses specific moral issues that affect our personal lives: privacy, particularly at work as it is affected by the Internet and other modern technologies; sex in and outside of marriage; family matters, such as adoption, surrogate motherhood, stepfamilies, divorce, parenting, and family violence; homosexuality; justice, mercy, and forgiveness; and charitable acts and social action.

Author: Elliot N. Dorff
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438401426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 621

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Book Description
This book examines biblical and rabbinic law as a coherent, continuing legal tradition. It explains the relationship between religion and law and the interaction between law and morality. Abundant selections from primary Jewish sources, many newly translated, enable the reader to address the tradition directly as a living body of law with emphasis on the concerns that are primary for lawyers, legislators, and judges. Through an in-depth examination of personal injury law and marriage and divorce law, the book explores jurisprudential issues important for any legal system and displays the primary characteristics of Jewish law. A Living Tree will be of special interest to students of law and to Jews curious about the legal dimensions of their tradition. The authors provide sufficient explanations of the sources and their significance to make it unnecessary for the reader to have a background in either Jewish studies or law.

Author: Elliot N. Dorff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190608382
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
For thousands of years the Jewish tradition has been a source of moral guidance, for Jews and non-Jews alike. As the essays in this volume show, the theologians and practitioners of Judaism have a long history of wrestling with moral questions, responding to them in an open, argumentative mode that reveals the strengths and weaknesses of all sides of a question. The Jewish tradition also offers guidance for moral conduct by individuals, communities, and countries and shows how to motivate people to do the good and right thing. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality is a collection of original essays addressing these topics--historical and contemporary, as well as philosophical and practical--by leading scholars from around the world. The first section of the volume describes the history of the Jewish tradition's moral thought, from the Bible to contemporary Jewish approaches. The second part includes chapters on specific fields in ethics, including the ethics of medicine, business, sex, speech, politics, war, and the environment.

Author: David Birnbaum
Publisher: New Paradigm Matrix
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
The Book of Deuteronomy depicts Moses addressing Israel before hisown death as he imagines that some day in the future children willask their parents to explain the meaning of the “testimonies, statutes,and judgments” (Deuteronomy 6:20) that are the foundation of thecovenant that binds Israel to its God. He thus frames in specificallyJewish terms the same set of haunting intimations that all thoughtfulpeople bring to the contemplation of their own lives—and, indeed,to life itself: the sense that being alive can or should mean morethan merely not being dead; that the contemplation of even the mostbanal features of daily life can yield rich insight about the nature ofexistence; and the feeling that life itself can be understood as a kindof scrim that might allow us to see through it to the secrets andmysteries that lie beyond.That set of hopeful suppositions inspires moderns just as stronglyand enticingly as it did the ancients. Yet, the specific question of whatit actually means for this or that part of life to mean anything at allother than what it overtly is (or, at least, appears to be) does not seemto have exerted anywhere near as siren a call on our ancient forebearsas it does on us moderns. Still, as we seek meaning in the world andin our lives, it behooves us to ponder the meaning of meaning as well.These twin notions—that life has meaning beyond what the2 Martin S. Cohencasual observer can see easily, and that the effort to uncover anddecipher that meaning can be profound enough to be spirituallytransformational—have animated the contributors to this volume, astheir work demonstrates just how meaningful the search for meaningcan be. Some have approached this from a spiritual point of view,grounding themselves in traditional biblical, talmudic, or mysticalsources. Others have framed their efforts in political terms or in deeplypersonal ones. And still others have attempted to consider the issuethrough the lens of modern philosophical inquiry. But regardless ofthe specific perspective of any individual author, all have in commonthe deep-seated conviction that life bears meaning…and that thatmeaning can best be discovered not by spending a lifetime hoping formomentary satori but rather by standing on the shoulders of fellowtravelers from earlier eras, and from that slightly elevated vantagepoint seeing just a bit further than they could or did. For almost allof our authors, then, the search for meaning is best understood as anon-going, intergenerational effort that links the seekers of all agesto each other through the contemplation of earlier efforts to mineprofundity and significance from the quarry of human life itself. It is,at best, a slow march forward!As readers will see from the Table of Contents, the ancient Bookof Kohelet has served several of our authors as the framework for theirinterpretive work. (Kohelet is the Hebrew name of the biblical bookalso known as Ecclesiastes, which name is derived from the Greektranslation of the work.) Others have chosen to grapple with thequestion Moses imagined future Jewish children eventually puttingto their parents as they wondered what the commandments actually“mean” in terms of the larger picture of Israelite culture and Jewishlife in our own day. Still others have addressed the search for meaningin life today by taking into account the question of human suffering,considering the issue both generally as a philosophical challenge and3 Prefacemore specifically with reference to the Shoah.Taken all together, the contributors to this volume have put forththe notion that life is ennobled, not trivialized, by the contemplativeeffort to seek meaning in the ebb and flow of life’s experiences…andparticularly in those life-experiences related to the service of God.And yet, for all they are united in that conviction, our authors in thisvolume of the Mesorah Matrix series are nonetheless a diverse group:older and younger women and men, North Americans and Israelisliving at home and abroad, seasoned scholars and newly-mintedrabbis and teachers. They are teachers and researchers trained indifferent schools of thought and affiliated with different movementsand institutions within the mosaic of Jewish life that characterizesthe House of Israel as it enters, by its own reckoning, the final quarterof the fifty-eighth century. They are a varied lot, our authors. But inmany ways, they are are, all of them, cut from the same cloth.Our authors work with the original sources and generally presentthem in their own translations. Citations of “NJPS” refer to thecomplete translation of Scripture first published under the titleTanakh: The Holy Scriptures by the Jewish Publication Society inPhiladelphia in 1985. In this volume, as in all books in the MesorahMatrix series, the four-letter name of God is generally representedby “the Eternal” or “Eternal God.” Authors who are specificallydiscussing the actual four-letter name, on the other hand, mayoccasionally depart from this usage in order to more clearly makethe point of their argument. .I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the othersenior editors of the Mesorah Matrix series: David Birnbaum andRabbi Benjamin Blech, as well as Rabbi Saul J. Berman, our associateeditor. They and our able staff have all supported me as I’ve laboredto bring this volume to fruition and I am grateful to them all.As always, I must also express my gratitude to the men and4 Martin S. Cohenwomen, and particularly to the lay leadership, of the synagogueI serve as rabbi: the Shelter Rock Jewish Center in Roslyn, NewYork. Possessed of the unwavering conviction that their rabbi’s bookprojects are part and parcel of his service to them—and, throughthem, to the larger community of those interested in learning aboutJudaism through the medium of the well-written word—they areremarkably supportive of my literary efforts as author and editor. Iam in their debt, and I am therefore very pleased to acknowledgethat debt formally here and wherever I publish my own work or thework of others.

Author: Elliot N. Dorff
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0827613873
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
A major Conservative movement leader of our time, Elliot N. Dorff provides a personal, behind-the-scenes guide to the evolution of Conservative Jewish thought and practice over the last half century. His candid observations concerning the movement's ongoing tension between constancy and change shed light on the sometimes unified, sometimes diverse, and occasionally contentious reasoning behind the modern movement's most important laws, policies, and documents. Meanwhile, he has assembled, excerpted, and contextualized the most important historical and internal documents in modern Conservative movement history for the first time in one place, enabling readers to consider and compare them all in context. In "Part 1: God" Dorff explores various ways that Conservative Jews think about God and prayer. In "Part 2: Torah" he considers different approaches to Jewish study, law, and practice; changing women's roles; bioethical rulings on issues ranging from contraception to cloning; business ethics; ritual observances from online minyanim to sports on Shabbat; moral issues from capital punishment to protecting the po∨ and nonmarital sex to same-sex marriage. In "Part 3: Israel" he examines Zionism, the People Israel, and rabbinic rulings in Israel.

Author: Elliot N. Dorff
Publisher: Psychology; 2
ISBN: 9780195090666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Bibliography: p.467-468.

Author: Elliot N. Dorff
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 082761389X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
A major Conservative movement leader of our time, Elliot N. Dorff provides a personal, behind-the-scenes guide to the evolution of Conservative Jewish thought and practice over the last half century. His candid observations concerning the movement’s ongoing tension between constancy and change shed light on the sometimes unified, sometimes diverse, and occasionally contentious reasoning behind the modern movement’s most important laws, policies, and documents. Meanwhile, he has assembled, excerpted, and contextualized the most important historical and internal documents in modern Conservative movement history for the first time in one place, enabling readers to consider and compare them all in context. In “Part 1: God” Dorff explores various ways that Conservative Jews think about God and prayer. In “Part 2: Torah” he considers different approaches to Jewish study, law, and practice; changing women’s roles; bioethical rulings on issues ranging from contraception to cloning; business ethics; ritual observances from online minyanim to sports on Shabbat; moral issues from capital punishment to protecting the poor; and nonmarital sex to same-sex marriage. In “Part 3: Israel” he examines Zionism, the People Israel, and rabbinic rulings in Israel.