A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism

National Jewish Book Award winner. This interpretation of Jewish teaching by one of today's leading thinkers in the Jewish world will appeal to all people seeking to understand the relationship between the idea of divine demand and the human response, between religious tradition and modernity.

The Judaic tradition is often seen as being more concerned with uncritical obedience to law than with individual freedom and responsibility. In A Living Covenant, Hartman challenges this approach revealing a Judaism grounded in a covenant--a relational framework--informed by the metaphor of marital love rather than that of parent-child dependency.

This view of life places the individual firmly within community. Hartman shows that the Judaic tradition need not be understood in terms of human passivity and resignation, but rather as a vehicle by which human individuality and freedom can be expressed within a relational matrix.