Judaism, like all the great religions, has a strand within it that sees inward devotion, the opening of the human heart to God’s presence, to be the purpose of its entire edifice of praxis, liturgy, and way of life. This voice is not always easy to hear in a tradition where so much attention is devoted to the how rather than the why of religious living. The devotional claim, certainly a key part of Judaism’s biblical heritage, has reasserted itself in the teachings of individual mystics and in the emergence of religious movements over the long course of Jewish history. This volume represents Arthur Green’s own quest for such a Judaism—as a rabbi, as a scholar, and as a contemporary seeker. This collection of essays brings together Green’s scholarly writings, centered on the history of early Hasidism, and his highly personal approach to a rebirth of Jewish spirituality in our own day. In choosing to present them in this way he asserts a claim that they are all of a piece. They represent one man’s attempt to wade through history and text, language and symbol, and an array of voices both past and present while always focusing on the essential questions: “What does it mean to be a religious human being, and what does Judaism teach us about how to be one?” This, the author considers to be the heart of the matter.

"What was piety like before the commandments were revealed? How did Abraham live in a way that fulfilled the ideals of piety without the Torah? This question, raised in the ancient Jewish theology of Philo and central to the struggle of Paul with his own Judaism and his emerging Christian faith, was raised once again by the Hasidic masters of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century. In a series of powerful and spiritually searching sermons, the Hasidic masters reinterpret spiritually the ancient rabbis' insistence that the patriarchs lived within the Law. In centering their spiritualization of Judaism around the figure of Abraham, these latter-day Jewish thinkers express a position that stands midway between the claims of the Talmud and those of the Christian apostle. Arthur Green uses this Hasidic debate on the patriarchs and the commandments as a point of departure for a wide-ranging consideration of the relationship between piety and commandment in Hasidic Judaism. The result of this effort is a series of rather remarkable mystical defenses of the commandments and an original contribution of Hasidic thought to the ongoing history of Judaism"--