Understanding Jewish Ethics

by Richard A. Freund

Book by Freund, Richard A.

325 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1990

Reviews

[Marsha Altman · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book hails from the mostly secular traditional of scholarly biblical exegesis, which is for the most part anti-religious and anti-holding traditional respect to the text. Man, I was really surprised to find out that the author was Jewish Theological Seminary professor; I assumed he was a professor but at a secular university. Anyway, not only is there biblical exegesis but the author includes as much as possible from the entire corpus of Rabbinical literature (of which he is obviously well-versed), some early Christian literature, early Islamic literature, and philosophical Greco-Roman literature. He quotes a lot of material, explaining terms, and peppers his discussions with scholarly academic terms.

The result is a mess. I couldn't make out what half the articles were trying to say despite being familiar with 90% of the terms in the book already, and the other half bored me out of trying. There was too much textual material in each article to make a coherent point. The only two articles with an obvious point are about modern concerns: women in Hasidic culture and AIDS in Jewish ethics, the latter being written in 1990 and therefore showing its age because of the way we view aids having changed tremendously in the past 21 years. So the article on women in early Hasidism is pretty much the only article I can recommend.