‘Im ba’et, eyma—Since You Object, Let Me Put It This Way

Abstract

The author is a rabbi, a seminary professor, and his primary reference group is not the secular academy, but the believing, practicing community of non-Orthodox Jews, no matter which label they apply to themselves. That helps to explain why Renewing the Covenant is a work of apologetic theology. The apologetic argument of Renewing the Covenant proceeds in two unequal steps. The first describes the experiential basis for contemporary belief. The Jews, as part of Western civilizations turn from messianic modernism but particularly because of the Holocaust, came to a new openness to God and acknowledgment of the importance of Jewish peoplehood. The second, longer part of the apologetic case consists of an analysis and synthesis of the beliefs uncovered in recent experience, God, and the Israel people. This consideration of God and Israel allows the author to enunciate his radical recontextualization of the general self as the Jewish self. Keywords: God; Holocaust; Israel; messianic modernism; non-Orthodox Jews; Renewing the Covenant; Western civilizations