Searching
It was in Kafka that Scholem discovered a kind of heretical, secular Kabbalah, a literature paradoxically at once canonical and nihilistic. With Max Brod and Walter Benjamin, Scholem saw in Kafka a deeply Jewish writer,…
Category: Jewish Tradition
Gratitude/2
For my teacher Marc H. Ellis who gave me apt advice when I nervously started started teaching in 1997: “Don’t worry about what the students give to you. Just give everything you’ve got to your…
Today’s One-Liner (#6)
The face offers itself to your compassion and to your obligation. –Emmanuel Levinas, in Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas
Reading Jewish
In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists. He got me back to Shakespeare and sparked…
Picking and Choosing
“Nothing Jewish is alien to me.” [Gerschom] Scholem liked to say that. We argued about it many times. I objected that a great deal that is Jewish is alien to me (and to him, too)….
Long Live Peretz!
Today we must take the most important thing that [Peretz] possess and that shines through in all his works, in all their times: his love for Jew and man. Also his universalism and humanism, his…
Dear Ziva
Dear Ziva, I’ve read two of Hillel Halkin’s books: Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic and A Complicated Jew: Selected Essays. (I loved his translation of Sholem Aleichem [Tevye the Dairyman and…
Present Minute, Only Minute
My grandmother in her old age Sold barley and groats at a stall In the market place. She did not measure her cereal More carefully Than I must minutes. — The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff:…
He Knew His Books
Jesus’ education in the Hebrew Bible is so extraordinary that he is able to quote a wide variety of texts with ease—and to interpret them with great depth. His knowledge of Moses’ Torah in particular…
Fire/1
One should flee from a group of idle chatterers like from a fire. –Chofetz Chaim, A Lesson a Day: The Concepts and Laws of Proper Speech Arranged for Daily Study