Found in the Notes of Chapter 9
Pirkei Avot 4:1–“Ben Zoma states, ‘Who is wise? He who learns from all people. Who is strong? He who controls his passions. Who is rich? He who rejoices in his own lot. Who is honorable?…
Category: Jewish Tradition
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,…
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…