Examples of Jewish thinkers and philosophers whose works include existentialist themes are Martin Buber, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Lev Shestov, Benjamin Fondane, Franz Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Emil Fackenheim.
Existentialism as a philosophical system grew as a result of the works of such non-Jewish thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger.
The Book of Ecclesiastes is broader in scope and includes many meditations on the meaning of life and God's purpose for human beings on Earth.
[2] Much Biblical scholarship and Talmud exegesis has been devoted to exploring the apparent contradiction between the affirmation of an all-powerful God's existence and the futility, meaningless, and/or difficulty of human life.
Juxtaposed with the believing Hebrew is the skeptical Greek "man of reason" who seeks to attain God through "rational abstraction".
The Greeks invented philosophy as an academic discipline and as a way to approach the problems of existence, eventually resulting in the philosophical works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard and other existentialists.
Therefore, the Jewish tradition is differentiated from the Greek system of thought, which emphasizes correct knowledge, thinking, and consciousness as the passports to transcendence of the physical world.
Some traditions of ancient Gnosticism, like the neo-Platonist desert cults, also subscribed to an idea similar to the Platonist ideal of "true knowledge of the Good" being a gateway to transcending one's ordinary, physical existence.
Various Jewish existentialists found influence in the secular philosophy of existentialism and have made various critiques and commentaries of the above-mentioned writers' works.
Modern existentialist philosophy often denies the existence of a higher power, leading some to classify it as an agnostic or atheistic thought structure.
Jean-Paul Sartre's book, Anti-Semite and Jew (1948), is a direct connection between secular existentialist thought as philosophy and Jewish existentialism as an expression of a religious mode of thinking.
There are no more Poles or Jews; there are men who live in Poland, others who are designated as 'of the Jewish faith' or their family papers..."[7]Even out of the ashes of the Holocaust, Sartre insists on the supremacy and ultimate victory of rationalism over tribalism and hatred.
Buber wrote extensively on a variety of topics, including Biblical translation, Zionism, Hassidic culture, folklore and his concept of "a philosophy of dialogue".
[9] He made a major contribution to Jewish existentialism with his popular 1923 book I and Thou (from the German, Ich und Du).
The book is concerned with the dual concepts of the "I and You (Thou)" and "I and It" relationship, which is Buber's attempt to answer several age-old existential questions about the meaning of human existence.
Buber says that human beings find meaning in their relationships with other entities in the world, whether these are inanimate objects, other people, or even a spiritual force like God.
He wrote commentary on the socialist Zionist movement, classic gentile existentialist writers such as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche, and Hassidic folklore and culture, among many other topics from a variety of disciplines.
His books and papers on Gnosticism and "philosophical biology" are considered an important part of early 20th century scholarship on these subjects.
The next phase of Jewish existentialism includes a variety of works addressing the horrors of the Holocaust, the term used to denote the German Nazi party's state-engineered genocide of approximately 6 million European Jews and approximately 11 million other 'undesirables' (including homosexuals, Romani, the mentally and physically disabled, and Slavic peoples) during World War II.
Generations of pre-Holocaust Jewish scholars came up with explanations for the existence of both evil and an all-powerful, all-good, and infallible God in the universe.
Many scholars contend that the enormous tragedy of the Holocaust represents an entirely new category of evil that one could not explain with traditional Jewish theology.
The preeminent survivor-novelist Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) raises a variety of unanswerable questions about the Holocaust in his novels, such as the best-selling Night (1958).
Emil L. Fackenheim was a Reform-movement Rabbi and well-known Jewish theologian who wrote on post-Holocaust theology and coined the term "the 614th commandment".
[17] Fackenheim encountered some criticism for his contention that it is worthwhile to maintain one's Jewish identity solely for the purpose of making sure that Hitler's genocidal plans are not fulfilled after Germany's defeat in World War II.
His basic thesis in his most famous work, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism (1966) is that the Jewish conception of God must change in the post-Holocaust era.
Rubenstein makes the point that it was not just the political and social trends of Nazism that allowed the Holocaust to occur; German Christians endorsed Hitler's aims both passively and actively.
Heschel critiques Heidegger's stance toward seeking an understanding of Being as the ultimate reality without reaching out to a higher power while at the same time living actively in the real world (as "biblical man" does), saying,
In Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik seeks to shift the paradigm of religion from one of "religious experience", consciousness, and interiority (i.e. profound meditations of the nature of the soul, the self, and God) to a more worldly "Lawfulness".
A classic example from the book of Halakhic Man using the law to add meaning to his own life is Soloveitchik's explanation of the religious Jew's reaction to a beautiful sunrise or sunset:
Dawn and sunrise obligate him to fulfill those commandments that are performed during the day: the recitation of the morning Shema, tzitzit, tefillin, the morning prayer...It is not anything transcendent that creates holiness but rather the visible reality..."Instead of simply wondering at the beauty and mystery of God's creation as the mystic "religious man" (like Kierkegaard or Heschel), Soloveitchik's "Halakhic man" has rigorous laws to follow for every new natural phenomena and life cycle event he encounters, thereby sanctifying his life and the existence of the universe with each day.