Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life
A Probing and Powerful Look at the Role You Play in Shaping Your Relationship with God
“No matter how hard we look, the God of Israel cannot be seen. Looking is not seeing, and seeing God is not like seeing an apple. It is much more like making a medical diagnosis on the basis of looking at a complex set of symptoms. Each of the symptoms is a dot. We can look at the dots and still miss the pattern.”
—from Part I
The Torah is replete with references to hearing God but precious few references to seeing God. Seeing is complicated. What we look for and see are traces of God’s presence in the world and in history, but not God. In order to identify those traces as reflections of divine presence, we need to re-examine how we see, what we see, and how we interpret that information.
In this challenging and inspiring look at the dynamics of the religious experience, award-winning author and theologian Neil Gillman guides you into a new way of seeing the complex patterns in the Bible, history, and everyday experiences and helps you interpret what those patterns mean to you and your relationship with God.
Examining faith and doubt, revelation and law, suffering and redemption, Gillman candidly deconstructs familiar biblical moments in order to help you develop and refine your own spiritual vision, so that you are able to discern the presence of God in unanticipated ways.
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Book details
- Author
- Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD
- Imprint
- Jewish Lights, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Pages
- 240
- Formats
- Hardcover, Paperback
- Subjects
- Religion › Judaism
- Topics
- Jewish theology · divine presence · faith and doubt · religious experience · Jewish philosophy · Hebrew Bible · Jewish history
- ISBN-13
- 9781580232494 (Hardcover)9781580233699 (Paperback)
About the author
RABBI NEIL GILLMAN, PhD, is professor of Jewish philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he has served as chair of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and dean of the Rabbinical School. His books include Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life, The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians and The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism.
Gillman’s Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew won the National Jewish Book Award. His The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.