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There is a tradition in Judaism of a positive attitude towards Christianity as well as a negative one, associated with Maimonides and more recently Leo Baeck, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, William Herberg, and Abraham Heschel. More recently, a group of Jewish scholars associated with Dabru Emet have sought to understand some traditional terms such as trinity and incarnation in terms of Jewish ideas.

This chapter focuses on Naphtali Herz Wessely, who was best known for his book Divrei shalom ve'emet (Words of Peace and Truth). Regarded as the formative text of the Haskalah, this book was a passionate response to Joseph II's Edict of Tolerance; in it, Wessely urged the Jews of the Habsburg Empire to enrol their children in state schools where they would follow a balanced curriculum, studying Jewish religious subjects as well as languages, science, and the humanities in an orderly fashion. The chapter then departs from the usual portrayal of Wessely and depicts him as alienated from both traditional and modernist Jews, as well as from the other maskilim, at least during the later years of his life. It describes Wessely's indecision and frustration, in particular his sense that no one properly understood his vision of cultural renewal, and it shows how Wessely's alienation was compounded by his anxiety about the growing dimensions of religious heresy and by his disaffection from traditional circles. The chapter also analyses Wessely's early writings, revealing that his major interests were twofold: the revival of biblical Hebrew as an essential tool for a more precise understanding of rabbinic literature, and an affirmation of the credibility of the Oral Torah that was being criticized by European scholars.

Starting with Jewish writers such as Avraham Isaac Kook and Haim Nahman Bialik, this chapter explores Chinese and Hebrew expressions for truth. Each has a distinctive connotation, each adds a new dimension to the quest for veracity. Emet, in Hebrew for example, suggests a commitment to comprehensive examination of a subject, from A to Z as it were. Zhen, in Chinese, emphasizes the need to reorient the subject’s eye/I and to develop a greater capacity for sincerity. Torah commentaries as well as Chinese classical and modern etymologies are explored to recover an “ear for truth” that has been lost among us moderns.

The Hebrew term for spiritual “service” is used to define the deepest meanings of a quest for truth. Similarly, the symbol of the Menorah enables us to describe the fractured luminosity that is the humble reward at the end of this quest, as opposed to harsh, total illumination. The reanimation of the old, a slow paced project, also lies at the core of Confucianism. This gradualism is the surest pathway toward veracity. Even an undergraduate once ill at ease with truth-talk finds his way to affirming the importance of seeking truth embedded in the fabric of memory and of the universe itself.

This chapter analyzes the Sefat Emet, a late nineteenth-century work that shaped the theology of Gur Hasidism. It identifies the two territorial belongings—the land of Canaan and the land of Israel—as representing two spiritual phases in the process of the redemption of reality. Inspired by the Zoharic Kabbalah and the thought of Maharal of Prague, the Canaan-Israel juxtaposition comes to represent the theosophical dichotomies of natural/supernatural, impure/sanctified, unified/diverse, and so on. The conquest of the land of Canaan was not an actual aggressive act, but rather an act by which the natural, impure, and fragmented conditions of reality were redeemed to become a supernatural, sanctified, and united order. This spiritualized interpretation not only escapes ethical and theological difficulties, but also redefines the relationship between Canaan and Israel as one of reciprocal cooperation within the divine plan and the cosmic order.

This chapter discusses the economic perspective of a birth right sale between Jacob and Esau using the bilateral monopoly model, explaining that the outcome of the sale will depend on the relative leverage each party perceives he has over the other. It also presents the application of the bilateral monopoly model in Jewish law that highlights the issues of fairness of price, the ethics of engaging in strategic behavior, and the option of whether to seize or not an opportunity.

Despite the undeniable importance of the concept of wisdom to Proverbs, reading the book as Wisdom Literature creates similar problems as it does for Job and Ecclesiastes. The book’s interpretation profits from better appreciating its complexity, perhaps more so because the obviousness of its Wisdom classification has previously discouraged attempts to do so. The groupings before Wisdom, such as Sifrei Emet and Poetry, provide forgotten nuances. The book’s widespread inclusion in a Solomonic collection invites comparison with the account of that king’s reign in 1 Kings 1–11. The variegated presentation of wisdom in that account associates the concept with political, legal, cultic, and prophetic texts. This intersection of potential genre groupings in 1 Kings 1–11 is also evident in Proverbs. Genres, such as Wisdom, are not “real” and should not restrict the insights from other textual comparisons.

This chapter examines the editions of Midrash Rabba printed in the sixteenth century, their readership, and the commentaries written to accompany them. It argues that commentators responded to potential difficulties in studying particular printed editions, for instance by providing readers with lists of errata or compiling glosses and corrections for printers to incorporate into reprints. A primary contribution of Abraham ben Asher to the study of midrash was the addition of extensive homiletic discourses to the Venetian text of Midrash Rabba. He thereby sought to guide readers to a correct and detailed appreciation of the sages’ expositions of the Bible.