Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim
Klein
Jewish Tradition tends to view
the Sinaitic Revelation as a one-time event wherein God revealed His will as
expressed in the Torah to the Jewish People. This book is a compilation of
various scholarly essays that explore the hard questions about what exactly
that means. For example, what was the nature of the content revealed at Sinai?
Did it include all or some of the Written Torah as we have it? Did it include
the Oral Torah? What about other rabbinic enactments?
Other matters probed in this book
include the meaning of Divine communication. Did God actually present the Jews
with a verbal message, or was His will somehow expressed in some other
fashion? Rounding out the topics that appear in this compilation are discussions
of Moses’ precise role in relaying God’s Divine Will and a comparative study about
how the laws given at Sinai line up with the Hammurabi Code. This book also
offers erudite critiques of the concept of an “on-going revelation” championed
by Professor Benjamin D. Sommer of the Jewish Theological Seminary and others.
Overall, the essays in this book
are all well-written, well-sourced, and definitely well-thought-out. Besides
the three editors, it also includes contributions from scholars like Rabbi H.
Norman Strickman, Rabbi Shalom Carmy, Lenn Goodman, Jeremiah Unterman, and more.
Some essays are better than others, and I felt about at least one or two essays
do not actually belong in this book, but I’ll leave that to the reader to
decide.
The Age of the Parákletos: A Historical Defense of Rabbinic Knowledge (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) by Ron Naiweld
Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein
The author begins this book with an
introduction that criticizes French intellectuals like Ernest Renan for
excluding rabbinic knowledge from within the accepted window of discourse. He
finds it appalling that French historians would ignore such important rabbinic
figures as the great Tosafist Rabbi Yechiel of Paris, and when they do not simply
omit any mention of the Talmud (which was publicly burnt in Paris in 1240),
they give it the short shrift. As the author formulates it, “rabbinic knowledge
was deemed by Christian authorities and intellectuals to be blasphemous,
dangerous, and false” (page xiv) which eventually led to the reality that in
France rabbinic knowledge was not to be taken seriously on its own terms, but
only as mere data points to be manipulated for the benefit of greater causes
(like French historiography).
Despite this promising introduction, the author
then goes ahead and continues following the very trend that he decried. In the
ensuing chapters, he offers an account of the origins of rabbinic knowledge and
its underpinnings by appealing to such outside disciplines as Christology and
Biblical Criticism.
In doing so, the author mythologizes the Bible
by characterizing it is a book aimed at merging two distinct conceptions of the
deity (branded YHWH and Elohim) and the tensions behind that merging. This book
also contrasts the more grounded worldview that it attributes to the rabbis
with the loftier worldview attributed to Christianity. In that context, it
argues that the First Century rabbis were more concerned with the practical
ramifications (or parallels) to their theology in the actual political power
structure applicable to their personal lives (e.g., in the way they related to
the Romans who occupied the Holy Land) than their Christian brethren were. It
is definitely an interesting read, but is sometimes hard to take too seriously.
Reviewed by Shira Yael Klein
This book is a strange
combination of a personal memoir about surviving cancer, combined with a book
about tefillah (“Jewish prayer”) — a combination which I understand in
theory, but I found rather incongruous in practice. I was very interested in
the personal story, but didn’t want to be bothered with the parts of the book
that wanted me to take them seriously and actually change something in my life.
I just wanted entertainment! I’m not sure if this is a shortcoming in the book
or myself.
The “story” component of the
book, which was the bulk of it, is both interesting and well-written. The
author’s candid and detailed account taught me a lot of things about cancer and
chemo that I didn’t know before.
I was very touched by how the
author’s whole family came together to support her and her husband with love,
devotion, and efficiency from beginning to end. The supportive children and siblings
vied for the great privilege to help. The author and her husband, for their
part, worried about not overburdening their already-busy children. Everybody
worried about everybody else, which meant that the family pulled together in
the most beautiful way.
I’m very happy that {{SPOILER
ALERT}} there’s a happy end to the story. I wish the author and her family a
healthy and happy life until 120!
