Thinking about Good and Evil: Jewish Views from Antiquity to Modernity - Paperback

by Wayne Allen (Author)

2022 Top Five Reference Book from Academy of Parish Clergy

The most comprehensive book on the topic, Thinking about Good and Evil traces the most salient Jewish ideas about why innocent people seem to suffer, why evil individuals seem to prosper, and God's role in such matters of (in)justice, from antiquity to the present.

Starting with the Bible and Apocrypha, Rabbi Wayne Allen takes us through the Talmud; medieval Jewish philosophers and Jewish mystical sources; the Ba'al Shem Tov and his disciples; early modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Luzzatto; and, finally, modern thinkers such as Cohen, Buber, Kaplan, and Plaskow. Each chapter analyzes individual thinkers' arguments and synthesizes their collective ideas on the nature of good and evil and questions of justice. Allen also exposes vastly divergent Jewish thinking about the Holocaust: traditionalist (e.g., Ehrenreich), revisionist (e.g., Rubenstein, Jonas), and deflective (e.g., Soloveitchik, Wiesel).

Rabbi Allen's engaging, accessible volume illuminates well-known, obscure, and novel Jewish solutions to the problem of good and evil.

Author Biography

Rabbi Wayne Allen serves as the co-chair of the Rabbinics Department of the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto. He is the author of Prescription for an Ailing World and Perspectives on Jewish Law and Contemporary Issues, among other books.