11 - Back to the Bible
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2009
Summary
The Holocaust is not the only critical event in this century which has led to a re-examination of the principles of Jewish philosophy. The creation of the State of Israel has also proved to be important in this respect, and the implications of the State for the continuing status of the Jewish people are intriguing. Whatever the relationship between the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel may be, it is clearly an important question for those concerned with the topic of evil and suffering, and a broad range of responses will be discussed. In some ways the discussion in the second half of this century of the Holocaust has been rather unsatisfactory. Old solutions no longer seem to hold sway and new solutions are not persuasive. Perhaps we are still too close to the Holocaust to be able to view it calmly and rationally, and it is too early to place it within its historical context. One of the major contributions which this century has brought to the topic is to question the value of a purely philosophical approach. Can the philosophical aspects of the issue be divorced from everything else about it? Clearly they can if we are to adhere to the philosophical project initiated by Philo and ending with Hermann Cohen, but if we join the project established by Buber and Rosenzweig and pursued with some energy after the Holocaust we might doubt this possibility.
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- Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy , pp. 220 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995