Ours is a time when the academic study of Judaism flourishes, but when learned exploration of Judaism’s central ideas has become rare. For that reason if for no other, the appearance of Abraham’s Promise is a welcome event. Perched on the cusp of today’s political and theological entente between Judaism and Christianity, Michael Wyschogrod’s thoughtful essays are the work of a scholar who has spent a lifetime developing a comprehensive religious philosophy, and who looks to share it with Jews and Christians alike.

An Orthodox Jew, Wyschogrod was born in 1928 in Berlin of Hungarian-Jewish parents; his family came to the United States in 1939. At Yeshiva University, he studied with the great talmudist Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, but his interest in theology was first piqued at New York’s City College, where he was exposed to the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. “I knew from the beginning,” he writes of the Danish Christian existentialist, “that here was someone of decisive importance to me.”

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