The Jewish Inheritance
Leon Wieseltier also took pleasure in studying with Wiesel. The two would spend time on the phone analyzing, say, a poem by Hayim Nachman Bialik, or a rabbinical text or midrash. Wieseltier prized the “depth…
Category: Jewish Tradition
Today’s One-Liner (#280)
After [Elie Wiesel’s] death on July 2, 2016, the Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum praised him as an “heir of Jeremiah with his message of rebuke but also of Isaiah with his words of consolation.” –Joseph…
Today’s One-Liner (#264)
We need to be vigilantly alert for any signs of being more focused on the ground we have covered than the path ahead and must regularly renew our fervor for the learning and growth that…
Selective Appreciation
We usually like prophets when they say what we want to hear. They are especially welcome if they heap indictments on our enemies. When they get close to home, it is a different matter. –John…
Today’s One-Liner (#253)
While he was eating in restaurants and walking freely through the streets of New York, and while his estranged son was growing up in the relative safety of Palestine, Bashevis’s fellow Polish Jews were facing…
To Learn by Heart
In a more general vein: that which we know by heart will ripen and deploy within us. The memorized text interacts with our temporal existence, modifying our experiences, being dialectically modified by them. The stronger…
Ecclesiastes
Compared with the neat little nostrums of comfort-mongering minds who cross our t’s and dot our i’s, Ecclesiastes is as great, as deep, and as terrifying as the ocean. If this philosopher were alive today…
Today’s One-Liner (#233)
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. —Ecclesiastes, 1: 14
Today’s One-Liner (#231)
The writer wakens you, the reader, he rouses you out of your indifference, he shows you the things you had not seen before, he makes your imagination work, he gives you wings, and you see…
Kafka, Sholom Aleichem, Peretz
In this respect Sholom Aleichem and Peretz are more like Kafka than any of the three are like most modern writers. The Yiddish masters are largely unconcerned with the psychology of individual difference; Kafka…