In Partnership with God: Contemporary Jewish Law and Ethics (review)

Vol. 10, No.3 Spring 1992 135 anthology of "Jewish Views ofJews" are just some of the important and interesting documents included. This is a very interesting book which fills in some pieces of American Jewish history and American religious history in general not often found. I highly recommend it to those involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue and those interested in American intellectual and religious history. The Rev. Robert A. Everett, Ph.D. Emmanuel United Church of Christ Irvington, New Jersey In Partnership with God: Contemporary Jewish Law and Ethics, by Byron L. Sherwin. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. 290 pp. $45.00. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a proliferation of different works which employed the title "Jewish ethics" in varying measures and foci. These works may be divided into three separate categories. The first category includes works which employed the words "Jewish ethics" but were really traditional format legal responsa lacking any serious philosophical investigation of ethical issues which are of contemporary concern. Generally, these works represent partisan position papers of the various Jewish movements in contemporary society and their attempts to develop directed solutions from Jewish sources. These works usualIy lack serious meta-ethical investigations and critical analyses of the "selected" texts, and the outcomes are often never in doubt from the outset. The second category of works was written byJewish writers from a variety of university and religious backgrounds; but all attempt to analyze selected Jewish texts in light of meta-ethical comparisons with other philosophical and religious systems. In this category, often no formal conclusions or halakhically binding decisions are reached but general tendencies ofJewish ethics are mapped out. In the third category are works which attempted to compare and contrast Jewish sources with some forms of meta-ethical analysis and make creative "suggestions" about the directions that Jewish law and ethics should move in in light of this analysis. Byron L. Sherwin's book, In Partnership with God: Contemporaryjewish Law and Ethics, fits into this third category. His view is set out in the first chapter entitled "A Program for Jewish Scholarship": "... the Jewish scholar is one who takes the raw 136 SHOFAR materials conveyed through revelation and inherited from tradition and recreates them ..." He advocates what might be caIled a plan for a creative but normative Jewish ethics intended to push the frontiers of ancient legal precedents beyond the confines of their limited contexts to new and perhaps unimagined conclusions. Not surprisingly, the book is dedicated to Rabbis Seymour Siegel and Moses Zucker, two professors from the Jewish Theological Seminary, whose views and methods are found in Sherwin's extensive research and source selections. Siegel, in particular, saw his role at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards in a similar light. Sherwin's work contains a series of "creative" analyses ofJewish works and contemporary issues and attempts to derive a normative Jewish practice from these analyses. Chapters on issues such as medical Jewish ethics, euthanasia, parent-child relations, genetics, and war/peace are woven from medieval, hasidic, talmudic, and modern Jewish sources in such a fashion that the reader appreciates both the vastness and diversity of the Jewish literary tradition and the philosophical arguments imbedded in it. This work is a series of lectures and articles which Sherwin has delivered or published in the 1970s and 1980s. The breadth of Sherwin's erudition and his skillful use of textual information is so extensive and rich that this alone justifies the anthology of articles. If there is a problem with the book, it is to be found in the nature of -anthologies, which do not always flow the way a single topic work should. While Sherwin attempts to provide some general philosophical framework and methodology in the opening chapters (Chapters 1-3) and in his final reflections (Chapter 12), these are not an integral part of his development in the middle chapters (Chapters 4-11), nor can the reader always discern how these opening chapters are manifested in his analysis. Three other parts of the book are of particular note. The extensive bibliographies and footnotes in the back of the book are exceIlent...