Strong Recommendation for “Come Now, Let Us Reason Together”

I am very pleased to have received the enthusiastic endorsement of my book, quoted below, from Rabbi Scott A Hoffman Ph.D, the spiritual leader of Congregation Adath Jeshurun in Louisville, KY. Rabbi Hoffman received his doctorate in rabbinics from NYU. I am very grateful that he invested his valuable time to read this text carefully and with the necessary background to fully understand my arguments.

I read Mark Friedman’s Come Now, Let Us Reason Together, subtitled “Uncovering the Torah’s Liberal Values,”with considerable interest.  We hear frequently that Judaism is inherently “conservative”, based primarily upon human obedience to the Divine, development in a linear fashion from generation to generation and tolerance for a very narrow range of beliefs and practices.  Yet Friedman proves, using traditional sources, that Judaism can also be seen as “liberal”, with a role for humans acting as partners with the Divine, a variegated and complex history of legal development and acceptance of a broad range of beliefs and practices.  And all of this is placed very skillfully in an overarching philosophical framework.  Friedman’s work is an excellent resource for layperson and scholar alike.