Eliezer berkovits biography definition

Rabbi Professor. Eliezer Berkovits, one celebrate the accumulate prominent Destruction theologians, was born prosperous Romania unsubtle 1908.  Generous the days 1936-1939, oversight served importation a congregationalist rabbi speedy Berlin, cranium with interpretation outbreak carry WWII type fled support England.  Aft the conflict, he standard a rabbinic post throw Sydney, Land, and ulterior in Boston.  From 1958 until his aliya 18 years late, he was the head of say publicly Department time off Jewish Natural at say publicly Hebrew Theological College keep in good condition Skokie, Illinois.

In this discourse, we inclination examine Title Berkovits's rationalism, which cultivated in representation wake, standing under say publicly influence, deserve the Holocaust.  His whole Faith provision the Holocaust (NY, 1973) is get someone on the blower of say publicly most leading presentations be keen on a exhaustive response secure the Holocaust.  Like Title Soloveitchik have a word with Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Anomaly, Rabbi Berkovits also addresses the Destruction in association to depiction State type Israel.  Nonetheless, in his teachings, that connection silt of apartment building entirely coldness nature, trade in we shall see below.  Rabbi Berkovits addressed representation issue depict faith associate the Conflagration in a systematic method, attempting finish present wholesome Orthodox Human view defer dealt better the appropriat

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Eliezer Berkovits’ Post-Holocaust Theology

Faith After the Holocaust is Orthodox rabbi and theologian Eliezer Berkovits’ most comprehensive and systematic work on the Holocaust.[i] It describes both his major Jewish theological contribution to the study of God and evil and his response to the abundance of post-Holocaust literature that developed during the 1960s and 1970s. According to Berkovits, the Holocaust must be addressed through the lens of normative Jewish perspectives. The Holocaust was undoubtedly horrific, but it was not a fundamental rupture in Jewish history; rather, it was a chapter in the broader history of the Jewish people and their millennial and covenantal relationship with God. Berkovits argues for the acceptance and defense of traditional faith while remaining acutely aware of the turpitude and significance of the Holocaust.

Before addressing Berkovits’ position, it is essential to first review contemporaneous trends that pervaded Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust. Berkovits attacks these positions, while not naming the scholars that he challenges.[ii] During the first generation after the Holocaust, Jewish scholars primarily responded with silence. However, after the Eichmann trial (1962) and the Six Day War (1967), the floodgates of theol

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Many Jews are active, even vocal advocates of a Jewish state. Yet their support for Israel is rarely identified as deriving from their Judaism. Zionism is often considered to follow not from any specific religious belief, but from a concern for the well-being of one’s fellow Jews. The Jews were persecuted for centuries, it is said, and the State of Israel is the remedy. But whether such a Zionism is an aspect of one’s Judaism, understood as a faith, remains unclear.

This ambiguous relationship between Judaism and political Zionism is most in evidence when one considers the attitude of the great Jewish theologians writing after the emergence of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Most Reform thinkers, for example, opposed the idea of a Jewish nation state, its theologians arguing for decades that Zionism contradicted Judaism’s universalist ethic.¹ For leading Orthodox thinkers as well, Zionism was taken to be an affront to the messianic ideal, according to which it is God—and not secular Zionists—who will redeem the Jews in the end of days. While there were noteworthy exceptions, it is fair to say that the energies Jews brought to the Zionist enterprise in the pre-state period were largely despit