Review of the book ‘Must a Jew Believe Anything?’ by Menachem Kellner

Abstract

As the Introduction to this stimulating book draws to a close, Kellner reiterates its provocative title and encapsulates the thesis in three sentences: Must a Jew believe anything? If belief is a matter of trust in God expressed in obedience to the Torah, my answer to the question is that a Jew must believe everything. If "belief' is the intellectual acquiescence in carefully defined statements of dogma, the answer is that there is nothing that a Jew must believe (p. 9). The alert reader will immediately notice that the key final sentence contains a qualifying expression with an ironic effect. The term "care fully defined" blurs careful definition, so that we do not know if the author means to deny that a Jew need assent to any dogmatic proposition at all. If he does not mean to deny this, the word "anything" is, to put it mildly, rather misleading. (from Conclusion).