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Mile Chai Books |
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Israel Salanter Text,
Structure, Idea
The Ethics and Theology of an Early Psychologist
of the Unconscious by Rabbi Hillel Goldberg |
Rabbi
Israel Salanter [1810-1883] -- ethicist, early psychologist of
the unconscious, Talmud scholar, reader of kabalistic and
Jewish philosophic literature; communal leader, bridge figure
between East and West European Jewry, troubled saint -- who
was he?
More than a decade ago I joined the ranks of
those journalists, essayists, scholars, and others over whose
imagination Rabbi Israel exercises a certain pull. Here
was a man whose biography was replete with paradox, and whose
writings, rather than reveal the man, seemed to conceal him.
On the one hand, Rabbi Israel was an Orthodox Jew born and
raised in a bastion of tradition--Lithuania. |
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Quote: Promote yourself,
but do not demote another.
Israel
Salanter
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copyright 1982 -
Autographed Edition
Reg $45.99
Hardcover 358 pages |
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He grew to embody all that
Orthodoxy in general and Lithuanian Orthodoxy in particular
revered: Meticulous observance of the Law and encyclopedic
knowledge of the Law. He penetrated labyrinthine texts, he
could teach, he could preach, and he was in the eyes of most of
his contemporaries, selfless. But on the other hand, he cast
a critical eye on his community. He pointed up its false
piety and its lapses in social responsibility. He disregarded its aversion
to sectarian revolts within Orthodoxy - Hassidism - and attempted to work
a revolution of his own, term the Musar movement. |
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| On the one hand,
Rabbi Israel was a child of the East European Jewry, where, even by the
mid-nineteenth century, Western intellectual currents penetrated only
isolated pockets of its society; and he opposed attempts to introduce
secular study into its rabbinical seminaries. On the other hand, he
left Lithuania before he was forty, spent almost all of the rest of his
life in Germany, the heartland of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), and
proposed the introduction of Talmud into German university curricula.
On the one hand, he read Bible, Talmud, and medieval Hebrew literature; on
the other, he wrote of the unconscious and of techniques for understanding
and altering it. |
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