Part of a Complete Breakfast

Don’t miss the fresh-brewed theology from FT’s November issue:

Meir Y. Soloveichik, associate rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York, writes on the theology of Michael Wyschogrod :

To Jewish critics, Wyschogrod’s emphasis on divine love and on the indwelling of the divine sounds more Christian than Jewish. Wyschogrod, however, insists on demanding that Jews refresh their religion from its original sources, arguing that a general and unspecific love is no love at all—and thus that God’s particular love for Israel is what makes possible his love for all humanity.

Despite—or perhaps precisely because—he is so rooted in Jewish Orthodoxy and so persuaded of God’s special love for Israel, Wyschogrod has not hesitated to engage Christians. One of his great contributions has been to transform the way Christian theologians understand Judaism. The Methodist theologian Kendall Soulen (editor of an anthology of Wyschogrod’s essays) first read him when he was in graduate school studying Christian theology. He felt “an almost physical sense of discovery, as if I had bumped into a hitherto unforeseen rock. What I had just read was undoubtedly the most unapologetic statement of Jewish faith I had ever encountered.”