Michael Wyschogrod The Body Of Faith Summary

Michael Wyschogrod was an influential Jewish-German American philosopher of religion. He was loved by many because he supported God’s love for not only the Jewish people but among the Christian thinkers as well. 20 years ago, when he wrote the book The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, the Christian people’s understanding of the Jewish faith came to light in a way it had never been understood before by anyone. He was a unique writer, one who never was apologetic for stating his beliefs whether the people agreed with him or not. This is why although he was loved he was equally as looked down upon by particularly the Orthodox Jews who thought that his writings about Maimonides, a highly respected thinker in the Jewish world, were extremely critical. He never held back on his opinion, and these remarks about him can be more clearly justified by one such line in his book that states, “It is a distortion of Judaism to claim that the Judaism of the Rabbis is discontinuous with

The original understanding of Judaism is the belief in one unrivaled God who revealed himself to Moses, Abraham, and Hebrew prophets by a religious life uniformly with rabbinic traditions and scriptures. God had made a covenant with the Jewish People, an agreement that followed as such: that they pray to him and observe his covenant and seek holiness within every aspect of their lives. In (Ex 19). God revealed the Torah to his people, both the written and oral Torah, and the entire nation responded, "Everything that the Lord has spoken, we will do!" The Jewish people consented to be constrained to this covenant. God laid down unique privileges and burdened the Jewish people with specific responsibilities which were notable in the Old Testament where god gave Moses the Ten Commandments and the reason why we observe the