You shall be as Gods

Fromm, a radical humanist (and a nonbeliever in God) still writes in the great Jewish tradition of optimism and of belief in human potential. Fromm had an excellent traditional Jewish upbringing, and although more traditional thinkers will disagree with his conclusions, they are at least well grounded in Old Testament texts. The book is a bit dated in that one of its intellectual underpinnings is the belief that human beings can perfect themselves through self-understanding, specifically through psychoanalysis. The twenty-first century has not been charitable to that conclusion.

This book shows how the Old Testament contained some key humanistic ideas that did transform our culture. This is the most historical of the books written by Erich Fromm. The commentary made the Old Testament feel both alive and strangely modern for me. The book quotes the Old Testament extensively in a kind of psychological, sociological, and liberal biblical study. This makes the book fairly rare and unique. I would recommend it to anyone who likes reading Erich Fromm and who wants to see a different side of him.

Fromm is a modernist, a humanist and an optimist and interprets Jewish tradition from this perspective. In this book he offers a radically humanist interpretation of the Old Testament: God evolving from an absolute monarch to a constitutional monarch - bound by the same morals and principles that govern humankind. This view is optimistic because it emphasizes our capacity to develop intellectually and become fully independent and free because of our ability to comprehend reality. This interpretation of Judaism could only have developed in the 20th century. It is an interpretation that has great attraction for me and without which I could not have written my own book "The Optimistic Jew: a Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century".

Erich Fromm is not only an interesting thinker but a fine writer, and in this book, one of many that he has written and all of which I have read, he outlines what he calls a radical humanist interpretation of the Old Testament and its history and traditions. In this interpretation, the concept of God evolved from that of a jealous, vengeful spirit to that of a constitutional monarch, and ultimately to a nameless God who is bound by the same morals and principles that govern humankind. Fromm is convincing in his arguments, and even for those readers who will remain unconvinced after the reading of the book, all will no doubt take away an appreciation of the depth of his scholarship. All of the three major Western religions: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, owe their origins to the Old Testament, whether this is acknowledged or not, and all have to this day a powerful influence on the lives of millions of people. And yes, as Fromm states in the book, the world's populations do hold a materialistic philosophy that is coupled with ever-increasing globalization and technology, but the acquisition of material goods and the indulgence of their pleasures coexists with a commitment to spirtual values and religion. This superposition of religious and materialistic philosophy shows no sign of abatement. The radical humanism of Fromm is a philosophy that is delightfully optimistic, and emphasizes the capacity of humans to develop their intellectual powers, to become fully independent, to understand reality as it is, and a renunciation of the initiation of force, the latter of which, Fromm argues, results in intellectual disintegration and emotional dependence. Eschewing a static allegiance to doctrines and concepts that therefore become divorced from experience, Fromm encourages the thinking of concepts as dynamic objects, and cautious that "they have their own lives", and can be aliented from the experiences by which they were invented (discovered). Forgetting the roots of a conceptual structure in experience will transform it to ideology, argues Fromm, and this ideology will usurp the underlying reality of human experience. History will become a history of ideologies, rather than a history of concrete, real individuals who produce ideas. Conceptual structures according to Fromm can never adequately express the experience from which they refer to, and the symbols used allow communication of experiences. But, this also allows an alienation of their use, since such structures are incomplete, and a rush to fill in the gaps, to pad the system, results in one that appears complete, but in reality is still fragmented. It then tends to a state of stagnation and sterility, making it inert and useless. Such is the history of religious concepts in particular, asserts Fromm. Fromm's interpretation of the Old Testament is essentially as follows: Stage 1: A dictatorial God as absolute ruler, jealous of the human potential to be God's rival. The use of force and bru