Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is an attempt to articulate the internal patterns of philosophical, ethical, and theological reasoning that are at work in Jewish synagogue liturgies. Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is also about the relationship between internal Jewish liturgical reasoning and the variety of “external” philosophical and theological forms of reasoning that have been developed in modern and postliberal Jewish philosophy. The book focuses, in its first chapters, on the liturgical reasoning of Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. It then attempts to furt ... More

Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is an attempt to articulate the internal patterns of philosophical, ethical, and theological reasoning that are at work in Jewish synagogue liturgies. Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is also about the relationship between internal Jewish liturgical reasoning and the variety of “external” philosophical and theological forms of reasoning that have been developed in modern and postliberal Jewish philosophy. The book focuses, in its first chapters, on the liturgical reasoning of Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. It then attempts to further develop the liturgical reasoning of these figures with methods of study from hermeneutics, semiotic theory, postliberal theology, anthropology, and performance theory. These newer theories are enlisted to help form a contemporary liturgical reasoning that can respond to such events as the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and interfaith dialogue between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The book argues that liturgical reasoning can reorient Jewish philosophy and provide it with new tools, new terms of discourse, and a new sensibility for the twenty‐first century.