Elliot N. Dorff

Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality: A Reader

Dorff and Newman collect the best of recent work in Jewish ethics. The volume will serve as an introduction to Jewish ethics by acquainting the reader with the distinctive methodological issues involved, and will also suffer a sampling of Jewish positions on contemporary moral problems; it will thus be suited to a variety of courses in Jewish Studies.

Jewish Images of God

After briefly describing my epistemological approach to God as a version of soft perspectivism and philosophical realism in which one comes to know God not so much by reasoning about the Eternal but rather by interacting with God in speech and action, I note one central problem of describing God – namely, the danger of limiting God to our descriptions and possibly even becoming idolatrous. I then explore how our images of God gain their meaning, how we can assess the truth or falsity of our images of God, and how images of God gain authority within a religious community like that of the Jews, all in a way that can avoid intellectual and religious idolatry.