Noam Oren

In contemporary Jewish thought, scholars often identify two broad philosophical approaches to Jewish identity: “essentialist,” which views Jewishness as inherent and unchangeable and “anti-essentialist,” which regards it as grounded in belief or practice. Both face challenges when confronted with a core halakhic reality: according to Jewish law, one can become Jewish through conversion, but can never cease to be Jewish. Essentialism struggles to explain conversion; anti-essentialism, the permanence of Jewish status. This study analyzes various explicit and implicit responses to this tension from thinkers of both camps and explores their broader religious, metaphysical, ethical and political implications.

Praise and thanksgiving prayers are central practices in Abrahamic religions and many other faith traditions. Recently, John Pittard and Daniel Howard-Snyder have articulated two arguments suggesting that the rationality of these practices is undermined by the claim that the God of classical theism lacks the moral credit necessary to warrant agential praise or thanks. However, for their critique to present a genuine challenge to traditional theism, it must presuppose an additional premise: that agential praise and thanks are essential components of an ideal religious life. I challenge this premise, arguing that the justification for religious praise and thanks lies not in God's moral standing but in the virtues or duties of the individual offering them. Accordingly, I maintain that debates about God's moral status are misplaced when assessing the rationality of praise and thanksgiving prayers.

Repentance is central to the doctrinal philosophies of all major religions. From a theoretical point of view, however, the practice poses significant challenges. As the past cannot be altered, the guilt that obtains from already committed sins appears forever fettered to the sinner. In this article, I explore this conundrum and discuss a number of solutions that have been proposed in religious traditions. I show how these solutions fail to satisfy from both theological and philosophical perspectives. Finally, I propose a novel approach that, I believe, solves the problem.

Rabbi Yosef Dov Halevi Soloveitchik, a leading twentieth-century Jewish thinker, assigned central importance to both science and religion. However, the relationship between these domains in his thought remains unclear. This paper analyzes Soloveitchik’s writings to address these questions. In The Lonely Man of Faith, he proudly states that the theoretical conflict between science and religion never troubled him. To explain this surprising statement and present his novel approach to the subject, I argue that for Soloveitchik, the tension lies not between the claims of science and religion but between their respective worldviews and lifestyles—scientism and religiosity.

In the past decade, philosophers have devoted a great deal of attention to the practice of petitionary prayer. Philosophical inquiries have posed a priori problems– issues that arise from an analytical investigation of the concept of God, the concept of petitionary prayer, and the relationship between the two. Taking a different direction, this article shifts the focus from possibility to actuality. Accordingly, this article does not deal with the question ‘Can God answer petitionary prayers?’ but rather with the question ‘Does God answer petitionary prayers?’ and, mainly, its implications. More accurately, I will present the tension between the religious belief that petitionary prayers can be effective and the fact that this does not seem to be so in reality, a claim that has been the conclusion of several empirical studies. Then I will present and examine several solutions to this tension. Although I will try to promote my preferred solution, my main aim is to clarify the problem and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the solutions offered to solve the problem under discussion.

Over recent decades, analytic philosophers (mostly Christian) have vigorously debated the rationality and efficacy of retroactive prayers, often explicitly or implicitly criticizing the traditional Jewish prohibition on such petitions. This paper offers a new framework, informed by-but not restricted to-classical Jewish sources. I contend that these texts encode an ethical norm governing the legitimacy of requests rather than a metaphysical constraint on divine power. Deploying an “ethics of request” model, I recast the rabbinic ruling and advance a broadly philosophical-theological account that clarifies if and when retroactive and other petitionary prayers are appropriate.

The Vienna Circle was one of the twentieth century’s most influential intellectual movements, known for its scientific rigor and explicitly anti-religious stance. Its members famously declared that religious statements are meaningless, mere “nonsense.” Against this background, it is striking that one of its members was a rabbi - Joseph Schaechter. Raised and educated in a traditional Jewish environment and ordained as a rabbi, Schaechter never abandoned his religious faith while actively participating in the Circle. This paper examines how he reconciled his commitment to logical positivism with his enduring religiosity. I argue that Schaechter developed an original and creative position that I call religious empiricism: the view that religious experience, like sensory perception, provides access to empirical knowledge of the divine. This innovative approach not only bridges science and faith but also laid the conceptual groundwork for the new spiritual movement Schaechter later advanced in Israel.