Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology

Contemporary theology, and Jewish theology in particular, Michael Fishbane asserts, now lies fallow, beset by strong critiques from within and without. For Jewish reality, a coherent and wide-ranging response in thoroughly modern terms is needed. Sacred Attunement is Fishbane’s attempt to renew Jewish theology for our time, in the larger context of modern and postmodern challenges to theology and theological thought in the broadest sense.

The first part of the book regrounds theology in this setting and opens up new pathways through nature, art, and the theological dimension as a whole. In the second section, Fishbane introduces his hermeneutical theology—one grounded in the interpretation of scripture as a distinctly Jewish practice. The third section focuses on modes of self-cultivation for awakening and sustaining a covenant theology. The final section takes up questions of scripture, authority, belief, despair, and obligation as theological topics in their own right.

The first full-scale Jewish theology in America since Abraham J. Heschel’s God in Search of Man and the first comprehensive Jewish philosophical theology since Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Sacred Attunement is a work of uncommon personal integrity and originality from one of the most distinguished scholars of Judaica in our time. (20090218)

Michael Fishbane's theological ruminations are among the most honest, thorough, and moving that I've ever read. "Sacred Attunement" will one day be considered essential Jewish reading, of this I'm sure. Moreover, it should be considered by all theologians, irrespective of religious affiliation, as a worthy attempt to, as Fishbane puts it in the book's Acknowledgments, "provide [readers] with a spiritual testament of my values and worldview." And what a wondrous and rich worldview Fishbane's is!