The Sad Hungarian

My story, "The Sad Hungarian" will appear in the spring 2014 issue of Jewish Fiction .net (Issue 13).

We Can Do Better: Lawrence Kelemen's Permission to Believe

Permission to Believe by Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen is a disappointing book on two fronts.  Its brevity does not allow the rabbi to pursue the topic at hand with nearly enough depth and scope.  Second, and especially in the argument by design, he uses science of dubious methodical soundness to prove that evolution by natural selection is statistically impossible. 

These are the major flaws.  A minor, and strange admissions is not a single mention of Jewish philosophers and theologians who have used proofs of God’s existence in their work.  Kelemen does not cite Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, ibn Paquda.  I’m not sure why you would write a book about rational proofs of God’s existence and  not cite these worthy thinkers.  He also ignores the Ontological Proof of God’s existence, arguably the most power of rational proofs, perhaps because it has always been in the domain of Christian theologians.  This is unfortunate, since it denies the reader access to a strong a priori case for God’s existence.

The final section is the most unsatisfying of all.  Kelemen uses Jewish history to prove the existence of God.  God exists because Jews continue to survive despite the odds.  Other ancient peoples are gone from the stage of history, but Jewish people march on.  This is certainly an argument for God’s existence, but not strictly a rational one.  It falls more in the faith category, and should not be in this book.

Unfortunately, a very good book on Jewish work on the rational proof of God's existence has not been written (that I can see).  Certainly, this is not it.

MAUS II: How do we depict the Holocaust?

Maus II, the sequel to the immensely successful Maus, is certainly as good as the original.  If anything, Maus II does lack some of the punch of the original.  We are all familiar theme of the animals, and the shocking juxtaposition of them and the world of the Holocaust.

Speigleman seemed aware of this, implanting postmodern intrusions about the difficulty of writing this sequel, as well as the enormity of actually writing and drawing about Auschwitz.

Despite this, Maus II delivers much of the spine tingling horror and dread of the original.  It is one of the founding texts depicting the Holocaust, and nothing will change this fact.

The Ontological Proof of God, Again

One must read gingerly through The Ontological Argument from St. Anslem to Contemporary Philosophers.  The book is not for rank beginners to the subject.  There are excerpts the works of philosophers who tackled the Ontological proof for God’s existence, in their own words, with little editorial guidance.  Anslem, Decartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, and more modern thinkers like G.E. Moore, William P. Alston, J.N. Findlay, Charles Hartshorne, and Norman Malcolm.

The collection is interesting in that is provides detractors comments about the argument; it is strange in that it provides ontological arguments for the existence of God which don’t exactly fit into the scheme as traditionally proscribed (as in Spinoza).

So, if you want to tip toe through the tulips of one of the strongest rational arguments for God’s existence, give this book a shot.  But the going will not be easy.