Judaism’s Challenge

This book highlights the challenges that face Judaism, captured by the dual implication of election: divine love and enmity with others. This challenge takes on great urgency in the context of advances in interfaith relations and a contemporary Jewish theology of world religions.

Rabbi Dr. Alon Goshen-Gottstein is acknowledged as one of the world’s leading figures in interreligious dialogue. He is founder and director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute since 1997. His work bridges the theological and academic dimension with a variety of practical initiatives, especially involving world religious leadership. His academic work is divided between contributions to early rabbinic thought, Jewish spirituality, interfaith theory and Jewish theology of religions. He has held academic posts at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and has served as director of the Center for the Study of Rabbinic Thought, Beit Morasha College, Jerusalem. The present volume continues his ground-breaking work in the field of Jewish theology of religions.

“The authors are to be commended for forthrightly acknowledging and wrestling with a number of morally troubling conceptions of the Other that are linked to or may flow from the notion of Jewish election, and for striving to find theologically nuanced ways to create greater tolerance toward outsiders and other religious traditions.”

— Joel Kaminsky, Theological Studies

“Goshen-Gottstein is, of course, not only a contributor but also the editor of this superb collection, indeed a curator who has shepherded the volume through a collegiality that makes the project particularly coherent. For the non-Jewish readers, particularly Christians and Muslims, the high degree of theological resonance in the narratives, doctrines, and ethics considered herein make the volume especially valuable. …This is also because many of the Jewish sources are untranslated, so that the breadth and depth of references here offer an abundance of witness not often available. But the merits of the volume are not limited to their resonances across Abrahamic traditions: non-Abrahamic readers are, no less, provided much evidence for historical and theoretical cross-fertilization in their own similar concepts and spiritual practices.”

“Judaism’s Challenge is not interested in how Jews relate to each other, but in how Jews do and should relate to non-Jews. … Once we accept that God created the vast cosmos, those of us in one extremely tiny corner of the cosmos—who hold ourselves to be the objects of God’s special love—are faced with the apparent oddness of the Master of the Universe choosing any subset of humanity as a special treasure. Coming to grips with that apparent oddity is indeed Judaism’s Challenge. … Libraries are full of books written about attempts by Jews as individuals and Jewry as a corporate entity to come to grips with the challenges of modernity. On the evidence of the book before us, more such libraries are going to be written. And in them, Judaism’s Challenge will have a prominent place.”

— Menachem Kellner, The Lehrhaus

“Goshen-Gottstein is to be congratulated for bringing these contributions together, for his insightful introduction, his own excellent chapter on the multiple possible meanings of Israel being a Kingdom of Priests, and his very helpful summary at the end of the book. There wasn’t a single weak chapter in the entire volume. … Judaism’s Challenge will be of immense interest to anybody wanting to find contemporary meaning, compatible with our modern and liberal sensibilities, in the doctrine of election, and Jewish chosenness. Academic Studies Press have also made it mouth-wateringly affordable, so there’s little excuse to miss out.”

—Samuel Lebens, University of Haifa, Religious Studies