Judaism for the Thinking Person
Religion & Spirituality:Judaism
Abrahamic Faith: Living in the Present and Future Moment Concurrently, and Having Nothing to Do with How We "All" Share the Father
"And because (Abraham) had a faithfulness in God, He reckoned it to him as righteousness." Few lines in Torah have done more theological mischief than this verse of five Hebrew words in Genesis. Is it really the essense of "Abrahamic faith" that "Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all share?" Or is the latter an imposition on the text to suit personal motives? Is Abraham's faith about obedience, or about being the first to have the correct theology [though it seemed Noah had that], or about something else? How is his "faith" connected to the rest of his life, whether setting out on a risky self-made future, creating various covenants and negotiations, going to war, or offering his son Isaac as a potential sacrifice? And what is his "religion" if he doesn't have Revelation yet and so isn't doing mitzvot? In this Torah study [with questions edited out], we bring the perspective of scholars like Jon Levenson (Harvard) to enlighten what these words mean, what a "promissory faith" is, and how it applies to our lives today.
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