Heterodox Responses

Mordecai Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew(New York: Macmillan, 1958; Philadelphia: Reconstructionist Press, 1967).

 See, for example, Buber’s Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant and his magnum opus, I and Thou. Buber’s approach was very influenced by a concurrent Protestant trend called “dialectic theology,” and, in turn, has been very influential on dialogic views of revelation in Judaism.

  For a brief summary of the distinctions between Heschel’s Torah as Midrash (i.e., a human interpretation of some primal content revealed by God), Buber’s understanding of Torah as response merely to the revelation of God Himself, and Rosenzweig’s understanding that this silent theophany nevertheless also conveyed a general sense of commandedness, see Neil Gillman, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), pp. 22-25.  See also Benjamin D. Sommer, “Revelation at Sinai in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish Theology”, Journal of Religion 79 (1999), pp. 422-451, who builds on a Hassidic teaching attributed to Menachem Mendel of Rymanov, in order to assert that Rosenzweig’s conception is rooted in traditional Jewish sources, and Jerome Gellman, “Wellhausen and the Hasidim”, Modern Judaism 26:2 (May 2006), pp. 193-207 for a rebuttal of this claim.  For various formulations of Jacobs regarding biblical reflections of both the human and the divine, see his We Have Reason to Believe (London: Vallentine-Mitchell, 1957), pp. 89-90, and in his epilogue to the 4^th edition (1995), pp. 139; God, Torah and Israel (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1990), p. 50; A Jewish Theology(London:Behrman House, 1973), pp. 204-205, p. 225; The Principles of Jewish Faith: an Analytical Study (London: Vallentine-Mitchell, 1964), pp. 219, 270-311; Beyond Reasonable Doubt (London/Portland, Oregon.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999), pp. 50-51  

 See BT. Sanhedrin 99:a, which establishes that even he who declares that all of the Torah is from heaven, but for one verse that Moses uttered on his own initiative, is to be regarded as denigrating God’s word.