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The lines of Michael Fishbane?s book trace the spiritual face of Judaism in one of its many appearances. Fishbane explores the quest for spiritual perfection in early rabbinic sources and in Jewish philosophy and mysticism. The ?kiss of God,? a symbol for union with God, and the ritual practices?meditation and performance?connected with it are presented. The book identifies a persistent passion for religious perfection, expressed as the love of God unto death itself. The masters of the tradition cultivated this ideal in all periods, in diverse genres, and in different modes. Rabbinic law and midrash, medieval philosophy and mysticism, public and private ritual all contributed to its development. Rooted in the understanding that the spiritual life requires discipline, the sages set up different ladders of ascension. For some, the Law itself was the means of spiritual growth; for others, more private practices were built upon its foundation. But all agreed that the purification of desire and the perfection of the soul offered the hope of personal salvation. None denied the historical redemption of the nation.

Michael Fishbane is Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Trained in biblical studies, he also writes constructive hermeneutic theology.

The world we engage with is a vibrant collage brought to consciousness by language and our creative imagination. It is through the symbolic forms of language that the human world of value is revealed—this is where religious scholar Michael Fishbane dwells in his latest contribution to Jewish thought. In Fragile Finitude, Fishbane clears new ground for a theological life through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. On this basis, he offers a contemporary engagement with the four classical types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis. The first focuses on worldly experience, the second on communal forms of practice and thought in the rabbinical tradition, the third on personal development, and the fourth on transcendent, cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. What he offers is nothing short of a way to reorient our lives in relation to the divine and our fellow humans. Written from within the Jewish tradition, Fragile Finitude is intended for readers across the religious spectrum.

Exegesis--interpretation and explanation of sacred texts--is the quintessence of rabbinic thought. Through such means and methods, the written words of Hebrew Scripture have been extended since antiquity, and given new voices for new times. In this lucid and often poetic book, Michael Fishbane delineates the connections between biblical interpretation and Jewish religious thought. How can a canon be open to new meanings, given that it is believed to be immutable? Fishbane discusses the nature and rationale of this interpretative process in a series of studies on ancient Jewish speculative theology. Focusing on questions often pondered in Midrash, he shows how religious ideas are generated or justified by exegesis. He also explores the role exegesis plays in liturgy and ritual. A striking example is the transfer of speculative interpretations into meditation in prayer. Cultivation of the ability to perceive many implicit meanings in a text or religious practice can become a way of living--as Fishbane shows in explaining how such notions as joy or spiritual meditations on death can be idealized and the ideal transmitted through theological interpretation. The Exegetical Imagination is a collection of interrelated essays that together offer new and profound understanding of scriptural interpretation and its central role in Judaism.

An authoritative look at Judaism's historical sweep and distinctive religious dimensions, showing how it developed out of the Hebrew Bible and has diversified throughout history and throughout the world.

First published in hardback in August 1985, Professor Fishbane's book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of textual analysis in ancient Israel. It explores the rich tradition of exegesis prior to the development of biblical interpretation in early classical Judaism and the earliest Christian communities, and examines four main categories of exegesis: scribal, legal, aggadic, and mantological. In studying this subject, it emerges that the Hebrew Bible is not only the foundation document for the exegetical culture of Judaism and Christianity, but an exegetical work in its own right. Professor Fishbane, who has added new material in appendices to this paperback edition, has been awarded three major prizes for this work: the National Jewish Book Award 1986, the Biblical Archaeological Society 1986 Publication Award, and the Kenneth B. Smilen Literary Award.

"Primacies begins with the assertion that there are primary languages before ordinary language, and these preverbal enunciations give voice to the depths of the human condition. These expressions include tears, the primal cry, and laughter. For Michael Fishbane, these primacies express the instinctive and raw emotions of our existential condition, and they are at the root of our most powerful literary expressions-of sorrow, loss, joy, and fulfillment. Through examples drawn from ancient, medieval, and modern sources in diverse cultures, Fishbane explores the verbal formulations of primacies in modes of structured language like poetic lyric or discourse. By giving articulation to foundational feelings and experiences through literary means, the primary emotions of the original creators are transformed-as are the sensibilities of those who subsequently engage these literary texts. Primacies is an attempt to consider the intersections of life experiences and their literary expressions. The result is a lived hermeneutics, both personal and cultural, that expands the theological project Fishbane developed in Sacred Attunement and Fragile Finitude"--

This is a comprehensive and systematic exploration of myth in the Hebrew Bible. In addition, Michael Fishbane examines the ongoing role of Scripture in the expansion and transformation of myth in ancient Jewish sources (Midrash and Talmud) and in the classical work of medieval Jewish mysticism (the book of Zohar). The role of myth and monotheism is taken up, and the texts of myth are subjected to close analytical treatment, dealing with matters of form, theme, and theology. In particular, the creative role of exegesis, and its capacity to generate new myths and to justify older or pre-existent ones, is explored. Aspects of continuity and discontinuity with biblical and ancient Near Eastern sources are examined, and the explosive innovations of myth in the various literary phases are considered. In exploring three major phases of Jewish culture, Michael Fishbane offers a new appreciation for the reality of myth and its varieties. Many new conceptual and analytical categories are presented, as well as numerous close readings of the texts at hand.

Following his first wide-ranging collection on biblical text and exegetical culture, Michael Fishbane supplements his previous investigations with this second volume of collected writings. It includes close studies in medieval Jewish liturgical poetry, Jewish biblical exegesis (plain sense, allegorical sense, philosophical and mystical senses), and modern Jewish thought (traditional, especially Hasidic, literature as well as modern Jewish theology). Emphasizing the varieties of Jewish exegetical culture, and the interplay between culture, text and theology, each study is intended to be paradigmatic for a particular cultural or literary subject and includes many comparative examples, while placing special emphasis on hermeneutical and expository matters.

"Shir ha-Shirim" -- Top of the title page.