Cold Will

This book interprets the moral teachings of the Judaic Midrashim, whose apocryphal commentarial stories reinterpret biblical events of war, genocide, espionage, and cruelty as phenomenology, rather than as great power politics. They ask not “What happened?,” but “How does it feel?” How was the geopolitical event at hand internally experienced in the souls, psyches, and inner emotional worlds of biblical characters, major and minor? Reimagining world politics as relations between “I”s and “Thou”s instead of states and governments, midrashic sources constitute indigenous Jewish international relations theory from antiquity to the Middle Ages to our time; their foremost concern is not survival but empathy. This work offers insights from Midrashim familiar and obscure to students of global ethics, interfaith dialogue and International Relations.