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God and his imaginary friends: a Hassidic metaphysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2014

SAMUEL LEBENS
SAMUEL LEBENS*
Affiliation:
Center for Philosophy of Religion, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, College Avenue Campus, 106 Somerset Street, 5th floor, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA e-mail: samuel_lebens@hotmail.com
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Abstract

What happens when you assume that the world is a dream in the mind of God, or that the world's history is a story that God is spinning? Focusing on the role that this assumption plays in the thought of Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1801–1854), at least as it is understood by Rabbi Herzl Hefter, I argue that this assumption generates interesting solutions to old riddles in the philosophy of religion and interesting insights into the nature of religious language.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 183 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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