Andrew Pessin's new book, "The Jewish God Question: What Jewish Thinkers have Said about God, The Book, The People, and The Land" offers an overview of the diverse, serious thought Jewish thinkers have given over the centuries to broad questions about God, religion, and Judaism. In addition to his writings on Jewish subjects, Pessin, professor of philosophy at Connecticut College, has written a historical novel, "The Irrationalist" on the life of Rene Descartes, introductions to philosophy and the philosophy of mind, and a book called "Uncommon Sense" which introduces readers to provocative, counter-intuitive yet valuable ideas advanced by different philosophical thinkers. But Pessin has shown an affinity for religious, metaphysical questions. His "The Jewish God Question" is something of a spin-off from an earlier book, "The God Question: What Famous Thinkers From Plato to Dawkins have said about the Divine". (This book has recently been translated into Chinese.) We have never met, but through reading and reviewing some of his books and through online communications, Pessin and I have become friends.
Pessin and I share some of the same interests. I am fortunate to see and learn from his gifts for literature, philosophy, and Judaism. Pessin seems to me to bridge the tension between broader-themed cultural works and Jewish works in an admirable and enviable manner. Indeed, one of the themes raised but not resolved in "The Jewish God Questions" is the nature of the interplay between Jewish themes and life and broader philosophical themes and life in various broad, diverse cultures. In addition to his erudition and enthusiasm, Pessin has the rare ability to write pithily and succinctly and to make himself understood to non-specialist readers.
"The Jewish God Question" consists of short summaries of critical ideas of 72 Jewish thinkers beginning with Philo of Alexandria and concluding with Samuel Lebens (b. 1983). Each chapter consists of about two pages of text summarizing an important thought. In the individual chapters, Pessin often moves from writing in his own voice to trying to get inside the mind of the subject of the chapter to show the problems he was addressing and the solutions he adopted. Each chapter is cross-referenced to enable the interested reader to explore the thoughts of other individuals included in the volume on related themes.
With the brevity of each chapter, there is no claim of being exhaustive. Still, each chapter distills highly complex ideas and, much more importantly, got me involved with the subject. The presentations help the reader understand what motivated the position under discussion and to think along for oneself. Pessin lets his subjects speak; I found it difficult to detect his own philosophical positions and approaches from the summaries he provides of many thinkers who differ greatly from each other.
The book is grouped chronologically into four parts, each of which begins with a short introduction. The first part covers Philo (one of my own Jewish philosophical heroes, together with Spinoza) through Ibn Daud (1180 CE). The second part focuses on Maimonides and his successors through about 1550. The key figure for part three is Spinoza, and the book takes the story of various responses to Enlightenment to 1891. Part four of the book covers the many, broken themes of the modern era including Zionism, the Holocaust, existentialism, feminism, post-modernism and more. Samuel Leben's Afterword offers his own overview of the contents of the volume and stresses the importance to Judaism and to society of the search for objective truth (as opposed to the post-modernisms and relativisms which make their appearances in Pessin's book) and of the possible value of the techniques of analytical philosophy. Interestingly, Lebens' own work that Pessin discusses to conclude his presentation is a somewhat playful, idealistically-oriented essay that I had an earlier opportunity to read in a book on contemporary idealistic metaphysics. Pessin offers a readable, sympathetic summary of what is a difficult, esoteric essay.
It is worth pointing out the thinkers who receive more than the one brief expository chapter in this book which perhaps gives some idea of the major figures; Philo, Saadia Gaon. Abraham Ibn Daud, Nachmanides, Gersonides, Spinoza, S.R. Hirsch, Herman Cohen, and Leo Strauss receive two chapters each. Judah Halevi, Maimonides, and Crescas are the only figures who receive three chapters.
My own degree of Jewish observance is small at best, but I have found it helps me a great deal to engage with Jewish philosophy and its themes. Pessin's book reminded me of works and thinkers I have read over the years and made me want to revisit or to learn for the first time about some of them. I also thought, in the context of my own reading and of Pessin's work, about the degree of weight to be given to particularly Jewish thought. As mentioned earlier, I admire Pessin for his ability to move between writing on Jewish sources and writing on non-Jewish sources. Some might argue, in a view I have some sympathy for, that a focus on Jewish sources, as in "The Jewish God Question" raises the possibility of an essentialist position with a too-heavy emphasis on identity and a separation of a distinctly Jewish approach to philosophy or to life from the approaches of others. Still, this is a question that Jewish thinkers themselves often raise and discuss with insight as shown in Pessin's book.
Pessin has written an outstanding overview of Jewish thought which I found moving and informative. Readers interested in Jewish philosophy will learn from this study.
Robin Friedman
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