Yahweh versus Yahweh

"Yahweh Versus Yahweh is a description of how the founding myths of Judaism have conditioned Jewish expectations from history. Jay Y. Gonen unveils the collective psychology that underlies Jewish psychohistory." "Central to this saga is a split between Yahweh the vengeful God and Yahweh the merciful God that appears and reappears throughout the course of Jewish history as a theme and in variations. The split instilled in Jews a deep sense of the precariousness of the self in relation to God, Gentiles, the land of Israel, and the End of Days. Gonen examines the appearance and reappearance of shared group fantasies (or founding myths) that were instilled in Jews by the old sacred lore. These shared fantasies, he argues, conditioned Jewish expectations from history until the present day." "The enigmatic God of Gonen's study brings to the Jewish people periods of construction and bounty at the price of periods of destruction and hopelessness. This duality, according to Gonen, runs throughout Jewish lore, literature, morality, the Kabbala, and Hassidism. It serves as the unifying factor in Jewish history - as it informed and influenced the establishment of the State of Israel and its laws, the history and future of Zionism, the debate over the Holocaust, the belief in the coming of the Messiah and the End of Days, and the current conflict in the Middle East."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.