The Holy One of Israel

Holy, holy, holy! The Lord of hosts! The fill of all the earth is His glory.

In these few ecstatic words, the prophet Isaiah captured the core of Jewish thinking about humanity, nature, and God. If the idea of holiness generally points toward God's transcendence, Isaiah brings it back down to earth, recognizing God's presence throughout the world. The Holy One of Israel is a philosophical exploration of that remarkable and distinctively Jewish idea: that God is everywhere, yet not in space. Lenn Goodman explores what can be meant by God's uniqueness, presence, and perfection. In a text richly resonant with the classic Jewish sources and in dialogue with the great philosophers, Goodman probes the ideas of revelation, natural law, the problem of evil, the challenges and limits of the idea of God's transcendence, and God's actions in and through nature, including human nature. This book is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in how our ideas about God can inform our lives and our thinking about individual and social responsibility and intellectual and artistic creativity and spiritual growth.

Lenn E. Goodman is the author of several works on Jewish philosophy, including Judaism, Human Rights, and Human Values, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy, and Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation. He is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 - Holiness in its Constellation

Chapter 2 - The Presence of the Holy

Chapter 3 - Who is Like God?

Chapter 4 - To Make a Rainbow

Chapter 5 - God and Evil

Chapter 6 - What is Positive in Negative Theology?

Chapter 7 - Natural Law

Chapter 8 - Revelation

Bibliography

Notes

Index