Fragile Finitude

Book excerpt: "In Fragile Finitude, the long-awaited follow-up to Sacred Attunement(2008), Fishbane clears new ground for theological experience and its expressions through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. His reinterpretation is based on the traditional four types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis: the contextual plain sense; the rabbinic legal and theological sense; the figural philosophical and spiritual sense; and the symbolic mystical sense. The first focuses on worldly experience; the second on communal forms of life and thought in the rabbinic tradition; the third on personal development; and the fourth on transcendent and cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. What he offers is nothing short of a way to reorient our lives in relation to the Divine and our fellow humans"--