Arguments for the Sake of Heaven 3d book cover jonathan sacks 1

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Arguments for the Sake of Heaven
Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism

Publication date: First edition (Jason Aronson Inc.) 1990; Second edition (Maggid Books) 2023

What is the future of the Jewish people? In Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Rabbi Sacks explores the contemporary issues that influence Judaism and the controversies that affect its destiny.

Setting out the traditional alternatives proposed by Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch, Moses Sofer, Abraham Isaac Kook, and Joseph Soloveitchik, Rabbi Sacks uses these models to examine today’s Jewish communities in the United States, England, and Israel. He proposes that in order to achieve Jewish unity, there must be “a candid acknowledgment of what divides Jews and an attempt to locate those divisions within the framework of tradition.”

If the Jewish world is to be mended, Rabbi Sacks contends, Jews must move beyond sectional thinking and recognize alternatives within Judaism. The tradition of argument requires respect for positions with which one doesn’t agree; rabbinic texts imply more than one legitimate stance. It is in this spirit of healing that Jewish unity will be achieved, and “to see this is already to have begun the transition from Torah as the faith of some Jews to Torah as the constitution of the whole Jewish people.”


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quotemarks
Jonathan Sacks writes with elegance, scholarship, and lucidity - I can think of no more important contribution for an understanding of Judaism in contemporary times.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Chief Rabbi, Efrat, Israel
An informative, important, valuable contribution to our contemporary literature on Judaism. Highly readable and intellectually entertaining.
Dr. Norman Lamm, President, Yeshiva University
This book is an outstanding panoramic discourse on the condition of Orthodoxy within the Jewish community, perhaps unlike any other that has heretofore been written. It amasses a wealth of sources, and combined with the author's own significant resources, adds up to a book of great significance. It is a book which deserves to be published and distributed to a wide audience of thinking Jews everywhere.
Rabbi Reuven P. Bulka, Editor, Journal of Psychology and Judaism