Jewish Philosophy

Jewish thought has almost never been written in the form of a treatise. It has settled into stories, maxims, marginal commentaries and parables passed from one person to another. It is a philosophy that prefers to tell rather than to prove — not for lack of rigor, but because it holds that an idea one has not lived has not yet been understood.

Four gateways

The lectures gathered here draw on four different bodies of text, each with its own way of thinking.

Pirkey Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, is the ethical side of the tradition: short sayings on speech, anger, money, friendship and humility, passed down from master to disciple since Sinai. Nothing abstract — the art of living, distilled.

Mishlei, the Book of Proverbs attributed to King Shlomo, carries on the same work with a different temperament: that of practical wisdom — sometimes blunt, often funny — which observes people as they are rather than as they ought to be.

Bereshit Rabbah is the great midrash on Genesis: the Sages’ reading of the first book of the Torah, with a freedom of interpretation that always surprises those who discover it. It is there that one learns that a text can have several meanings without any of them cancelling the others.

The three Patriarchs, finally, are not merely ancestors. Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov trace three ways of being in the world — impetus, restraint, synthesis — and the tradition reads them as three dimensions present in each of us.

A way of thinking that engages

What connects these four paths is the refusal to separate reflection from life. One does not study wisdom in order to know it; one studies it in order to become someone. It is demanding — and it is also what makes study come alive.

The lectures in this section assume no prior knowledge. They start from the text, explain it, and then let it do its work.