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Podcast: New Books in Ancient History
Episode: Dov Weiss, “Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
Description: Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah. In Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age.Weiss argues that this particular Jewish relationship to the divine is rooted in the most canonical of rabbinic...