FAITH AND FREEDOM: Passover Haggadah with Commentary from the Writings of Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits

Faith and Freedom Passover Haggadah presents selections of the writings of Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, one of the major Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, as a new and meaningful commentary for the Passover Haggadah. The Seder night experience will be enriched with the reading of the traditional telling of the Exodus along with Rabbi Berkovits' insightful and refreshing ideas that address crucial topics for the modern era.

ELIEZER BERKOVITS (1908–1992) was a renowned philosopher, theologian, and talmudic scholar. He studied under Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg at the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin, and he received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Berlin. He served in the rabbinate in Berlin (1934–1939), in Leeds, England (1940–1946), in Sydney, Australia (1946–1950), and in Boston (1950–1958). In 1958 he became chair of the philosophy department at the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago, and thereafter, in 1976 he made aliyah to live the remainder of his life in Israel. In addition to his numerous philosophical writings and articles, he was the author of nineteen books including Faith After the Holocaust, God, Man and History, and Not In Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halakha. He also wrote two works on Halakha that were published in Hebrew: Conditionality in Marriage and Divorce and Halakha: Its Authority and Function.

REUVEN MOHL attended Yeshivat Hakotel under Rav Aharon Bina and then completed his undergraduate studies at Yeshiva University. He earned his Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from New York University Dental School and received Rabbinic Ordination from Rav Zalman Nechemia Goldberg of Jerusalem. He has a private dental practice in New York City and lives in Teaneck, New Jersey with his wife and three children.

Over the past twenty years, a scholarly resurgence of interest in the life, work, and thought of renowned rabbi and theologian Eliezer Berkovits has occurred. The present volume—an Expertly curated selection of excerpts from Berkovits’ massive English language oeuvre, serving as a commentary on the Passover Haggadah—is firmly rooted in this development. For those less familiar with Berkovits’ scholarship, Faith and Freedom is an accessible entry point into Berkovits’ writings on the Holocaust, Zionism, Jewish law, and Jewish philosophy. The selections span some fifty years of Berkovits’ rabbinic and academic career and include philosophical ruminations on the nature and function of Jewish law, Jewish history, post-Holocaust theology, the establishment of the State of Israel, biblical interpretation, and more. Mohl highlights key themes in Berkovits’ corpus: faith, prayer, ethics, freedom, and hester panim—divine absence or self-limitation in human affairs. Some passages are directly relevant to the rituals of the Passover Seder, while others build loosely upon textual inferences in the Haggadah. The volume also includes the entire text of the Haggadah in both Hebrew and English translation, a foreword by Berkovits’ children, Dov and Avraham Berkovits, a brief introduction by Mohl, and a useful bibliography of Berkovits’ books and articles quoted in the work. One wishes Mohl had included excerpts from Berkovits’ important Hebrew language writings and lesser-known German works as well. That notwithstanding, the editor and Urim Publications should be commended for making Berkovits’ work much more accessible. Faith and Freedom is an outstanding resource for both scholars and general readers alike to meaningfully engage with the Haggadah, the seminal text of Jewish collective memory.

-Jonathan Zisook, University of Pittsburgh