Confronting Vulnerability – The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics

“This volume is an outstanding exploration–not only for its insight but also for its ability to make rabbinic ethics and insights accessible to those who lack facility in reading rabbinic sources in Hebrew. It is a major contribution to the religious ethics literature.”

— “Choice”

“Schofer has written a compelling work that focuses attention on issues that are often difficult to reflect upon. The texts examined are well-chosen, and he is clearly in command of both the primary rabbinic literature and the larger comparative ethical materials….book that not only adds to our knowledge of character formation in rabbinic texts but also provides scholars with another model for how to use a specialized academic discourse to engage questions of perennial importance.” –Phillip Sherman

“It is a rare scholarly book that is moving, but Confronting Vulnerability is. Jonathan Schofer elegantly synthesizes two different kinds of writing that might seem to be incompatible. On one hand, he provides rigorous, historically grounded, philologically sound, and imaginative textual analysis. At the same time, he coaxes the reader towards subjective personal reflection. This remarkable book makes an important contribution to the study of rabbinic culture by examining how rabbinic texts shaped an ethic for the historical adherents of the rabbinic movement. But more importantly, this is a book that is humanly compelling, asking us to contemplate the implications of having life framed by bodily fragility on one hand and divine judgment on the other. Confronting Vulnerability articulates poignantly, but without sentimentality, a unique perspective on the human condition.”

–Elizabeth Alexander, University of Virginia

“Engaging, clear, and fun to read, Confronting Vulnerability is an exciting book with that goes well beyond its specialist contribution. Because it engages with issues of fundamental human importance–how we confront our bodily nature, its weaknesses and its aging–it has something to offer to anyone who is interested in those questions. Furthermore, Schofer is an articulate and careful scholar with interesting observations about how to do comparative ethics.”–Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago

Jonathan Wyn Schofer is associate professor of comparative ethics at Harvard Divinity School and the author of The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics.