This book weaves together autobiography, philosophical reflection, and theological insights. It tells the story of how we came to inhabit a Jewish life, and how, along the way, we discovered and learned to cherish some of Judaism’s deepest values. Written in the midst of the realities of contemporary Israel, it reflects on the lifeworld I have fashioned through an ongoing conversation with modern Jewish philosophers. That conversation ranges across Zionism and hermeneutics, religious life and interreligious encounter, ecology and the Holocaust, bringing philosophical thought into dialogue with the experiences, commitments, and questions of a life lived as a Jew in Israel.

I belong deeply to the Jewish people, and I belong to the wider human world. I have never understood these allegiances as competing with one another. Particularity and universality are, to my mind, correlative: each gives meaning and depth to the other, held together in what I call trans-difference. I write as an Israeli Jew, rooted in a particular history and tradition, who participates critically and constructively in the continuing Zionist project while remaining open to the claims, encounters, and responsibilities of a shared world.

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Ephraim Meir, Professor emeritus of modern Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University