Before his rather sudden passing in 2020, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was one of the most eloquent and influential religious leaders of the generation. As Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth for over two decades, he offered a universal message cultivated from the Jewish and Western cannons he knew so well. One concept that figured prominently in his work was joy. “I think of Judaism as an ode to joy,� he once wrote. “Like Beethoven, Jews have known suffering, isolation, hardship, and rejection, yet they never lacked the religious courage to rejoice.� In this volume, organized by the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership, academics and writers explore the significance of joy within the Jewish tradition. These essays and reflections discuss traditional Jewish primary sources, including Biblical, Rabbinic and Hebrew literature, Jewish history and philosophy, education, the arts, and positive psychology, and of course, through the prism of Lord Sacks’ work. 

This book explores the protests of Job from the perspectives of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious and philosophical traditions. Shira Weiss examines how challenges to divine justice are understood from a Jewish theological perspective, including the pro-protest and anti-protest traditions within rabbinic literature, in an effort to explicate the ambiguous biblical text and Judaism's attitude towards the suffering of the righteous. Scott Davison surveys Christian interpretations of the book of Job and the nature of suffering in general before turning to a comparison of the lamentations of Jesus and Job, with special attention to the question of whether complaints against God can be expressions of faith. Sajjad Rizvi presents the systematic ambiguity of being present in monistic approaches to reality as one response to evil and suffering in Islam, along with approaches that attempt a resolution through the essential erotic nature of the cosmos, and explores the suggestion that Job is the hero of a metaphysical revolt that is the true sign of a friend of God. Each author also provides a response essay to the essays of the other two authors, creating an interfaith dialogue around the problem of evil and the idea of protest against the divine.

Joseph Albo on Free Choice discovers unsuspected philosophical originality in the interpretations of biblical narrative found in Joseph Albo's Book of Principles, one of the most popular Hebrew works in the corpus of medieval Jewish philosophy. Several of Albo's exegetical analyses focus on free choice, which emerges as a conceptual scheme throughout his work. An exploration of Albo's innovative homiletical interpretations of the binding of Isaac, the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, the Book of Job, and God's choice of Israel, reveals his view of free choice which was significant during a historical period of religious coercion. Albo's sole surviving responsum dealing with the case of the qatlanit further demonstrates his philosophical position. In this new book, Shira Weiss shows that in the medieval era in which Albo lived, free choice was an important topic, subject to vehement debate that has continued to be contested in modern philosophy.