The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen This is a collated version of parts one, two and three of my mini-series on the Jewish neo-Kantian ethicist Hermann Cohen. The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and an intellectual precursor to the 20th century Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Bu

The Heterodox Judaism of Baruch Spinoza There is only one and unique substance in existence, a substance that is infinite, self-caused, and eternal. This substance is the spatio-temporal world. But it is also God, says Baruch Spinoza, the Sephardi Jew from Amsterdam excommunicated by the Talmud Torah congregation. The Heterodox Judaism of Baruch Spinoza Baruch Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam to a Sephardi Jewish family who had fled Portugal because of persecution by th

Baal Tqiah (One Who Blows the Shofar) Baal Tqiah (One Who Blows the Shofar) A storm wind comes from the hidden north filling my mouth, my lungs, with dust and sand from Sinai. Then a great cloud of black, a no-thingness that deprives me of sense, of touch and taste, of sight, smell and hearing. Then a winding of burning. No, not wind, but f