The Maccabees won the battle, but did they lose the war? Modern scholarship demonstrates that Judaism was irrevocably transformed by its encounter with Hellenism, which ushered in a new way of thinking about existence and God’s place within it. Post-modern philosophers raised searing critiques of Hellenistic metaphysics and theology. In a remarkable passage, Rav Kook articulates the sharpest of these. He goes on to read the Hanukkah miracle as an allegory for the ultimate resolution to the crisis, one which anticipates key ideas of postmodern thinker Jacques Derrida. Aton Holzer explains....

Responding to his interlocutors, Todd Berman defends the position he staked out in his recent TRADITION essay, maintaining that as far as the doctrine of Divine Pathos goes, Abraham J. Heschel offered an authentic reading of Jewish tradition—against the critique penned by Eliezer Berkovits in TRADITION in 1964.

TRADITION’s most recent issue featured a lengthy essay by Todd Berman exploring a nearly 6-decade-old critique launched by R. Eliezer Berkovits on Dr. Abraham J. Heschel’s “Theology of Pathos.” In brief, the debate centered on Heschel’s contention that God experiences emotion after a fashion. Berkovits’ essay aroused debate among our editorial board, and Berman’s essay has evoked similar sharp differences of opinion among our readers. In advance of an exchange of letters between critics and the author, TRADITION’s editor has done a deep-dive of our archives to helped to resurface some interesting related content and context.