Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel
It is fascinating to compare and contrast the world of Greek and Judaic thought. Each people had a sense of purpose and manifest destiny. While Alexander sought to Hellenize the barbarian world, ancient Israel chose to bear witness to God’s Presence and Reality by introducing ethical monotheism to the world.
Unlike the Greek philosophers who sought to understand God as the Ultimate Reality of the logical order in discursive terms, Israel’s ...
Learn More ShareAs Creator, and the Source of our being, God continuously brings our existence out of the abyss of nothingness, and is renewed with the possibility of new life. God’s love and compassion is bio-centric and embraces the universe in its totality. God’s power is not all-powerful (in the simplistic sense); nor is it coercive in achieving this end, but is all-relational in His capacity to relate to the world—even suffer with it as well. God’s love initiates new beginnings and ...
Learn More ShareOver the years I have noticed that when it comes to the recitation of the Shema prayer, most Jews readily chant the first paragraph of the Shema with enthusiasm. The first paragraph reads:
Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today. Drill them into your children. Speak of ...
Unlike the Greek philosophers and poets of antiquity, the ancients of Judea did not perceive God as a philosophical construct, nor as a static timeless being, nor as an impersonal cosmic process, energy, force or intelligence and certainly not as a sentimentalized ethical ideal (as expressed by Feuerbach, Freud, and M. Kaplan). Our spiritual ancestors never apologized for using human language in describing God.
The ...
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