Rashi's Daughters
by Maggie Anton
Banot Press , 386 pp.

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Perhaps the greatest of all Jewish scholars, whose commentaries are at the centre of every student's intellectual life, was Solomon ben Isaac of medieval France (or Rashi for short). He fathered only daughters, and it has long been rumoured that he taught them Talmud (going against strong opposing views on this, common in the 11th century, and before, and since), possibly even teaching them to lay tefillin and pray regularly, which were not considered obligations for the female sex. The once secular, now religious and scholarly author recognized the gold mine which lay behind this seemingly minor factoid of Jewish history: what was it like to be a woman, a millennium ago? A Jewish woman? What was it like for an intelligent young Jewish girl to be caught up in such a patriarchal faith, with its rigid laws about sexuality, marriage, and more? Or to be a brilliant scholar with no son to study with or inspire? This is the background for the trilogy by American novelist Maggie Anton, Rashi's Daughters (Book I: Joheved; Book II, just published, Miriam).

The author has done something both admirable and remarkable: she has immersed herself in Jewish medieval history and the Talmud, and sprinkles both heavily through the first two books of her planned trilogy of novels, so that the reader, like each of Rashi's daughters, finds him/herself studying Jewish thought in greater depth than most people do in their lifetime. So, half-way through Joheved, we read from the Mishna, "Women, slaves, and minors are exempt from reciting the Shema and from laying tefillin. . . ." The author goes on, "This didn't sound right. She and Miriam both said the Shema at night as protection against demons; every Jew did. Papa, why are women exempt from these mitzvot?"

Lovers of erotica (and Judaism) may be thrilled to read of the marriage night between Joheved and her beloved groom, which is one of the most beautifully and voluptuously depicted sex scenes ever captured in print. (It's also, not unintentionally, one of the greatest advertisements for saving oneself for marriage, and for the keeping of the laws of niddah, or separation during and after a woman's monthly period.) And those of us who have questioned the seemingly anti-life and anti-pleasure attitudes toward sexuality in the other major Abrahamic faiths (the covering of women from head to toe by burkas in several Muslim lands; the linking of sex with the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden in Christianity, along with the glorification of virginity), will be delighted to read such sympathetic lines from other Jewish texts as "You should delay your climax until your wife has her climax first, and then she will conceive sons." Sexist, perhaps, but please advise me of other faiths which express any interest whatsoever in women's satisfaction from sexual congress.

Rashi's Daughters is a most welcome addition to modern Jewish writing. And a daring one, as well: in Miriam, the second of the series, her husband is filled with longing toward his own gender. (The author is nothing if not controversial in her topics and plots). Are these books Great Art; Literature? I don't think so: they are an inspired concept, deeply researched and well presented. The books lack the authority, power, beauty and depth of quality writing, and too often appear to be study guides to the Talmud, or James A. Michener-type histories (remember Hawaii, Alaska, Poland?) of medieval Judaism. There is often an awkwardness to Ms. Anton's prose, as if she feels obliged to explain all these strange, exotic Jewish beliefs and rituals to non-Jewish (and Jewish!) readers. She is no Saul Bellow or Phillip Roth or Cynthia Ozick, but that's fine; she has set out to write several novels of "Love and The Talmud in Medieval France" as the paperback covers announce proudly, and she is a talented, if limited writer. I am glad that I read the first two volumes of Rashi's Daughters , and I certainly look forward to Anton's final novel. I've certainly never encountered a better depiction of what it was like to be a Jew in Christian Europe, nearly a thousand years ago. Or what it was like to be a thoughtful, devout, yet wise young woman, either.

Praise Her Works
by Penina Adelman

Reviewed by Allan Gould

Sometimes, a new book seems to cry out, "Why hasn't anyone thought of that before?" I felt that strongly while reading, and enjoying greatly, a lovely paperback recently put out by the Jewish Publication Society of Philadelphia, called Praise Her Works: Conversations with Biblical Women, edited by Penina Adelman, a scholar-in-residence at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.

What a great idea this is, and beautifully developed! The concept is inspired: there was, apparently, a little-known Yemenite text written in the 13th century called Midrash HaGadol, of which only parts were previously translated into English. (Even if this text was non-existent, or a hoax, I'm still thrilled by the use of it here). Each of nearly two dozen "Biblical women" were linked, in the original midrash, to a different line in the famous "Eyshet Chayil" from the Book of Proverbs, which is sung traditionally by a Jewish husband to his wife at the Sabbath table. (So, for example, Noah's wife, who is not even given the honour of a name in the Torah, is linked with the opening line "A woman of valor/who can find"; Yocheved, the mother of Moses, is hooked to "She sets her mind on an estate and acquires it," etc.)

What editor Adelman (who has also written nearly a third of these chapters) has done is explained beautifully in her Introduction: "New rituals are found, not made. They are waiting to be uncovered, like the sculpture living inside the stone. Books are often the same. Praise Her Works is a book inspired by a ritual, which, in turn, emerged from a text. Jewish creativity encourages interaction between tradition, text, and human being."

Every chapter in this book, covering every historical woman of our heritage—not all of them Jewish, which is intriguing; I was fascinated to see Vashti (of Purim fame) included in a joint chapter with the heroine Esther—is laid out in the same way: we get a solid, prose description from Jewish texts of the woman; then an often-scholarly commentary; then a "message" from that Famous Ancient Woman to the reader; then a marvelous study section called "For Further Thought," which has questions for the reader to consider ("What were your impressions of Sarah, the Matriarch, when you were a young girl? Compare them to your impressions now. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Sarah's relationship with Abraham? What enabled their marriage to last?), followed by suggested readings from sourcebooks, books, works such as Genesis: The Feminist Companion to the Bible, and so on.

I approached this book the way I think most people—both women AND men—should: I looked up our daughter's name, Elisheva, who, I find, 95% of Biblical readers cannot identify as the wife of Aaron, the High Priest. (Her name is mentioned only once in the second book of the Five Books of Moses, but there are interesting comments in the Talmud about her), and read it to my wife, who is her mother. We were both moved by the section, "Elisheba Speaks," when she describes how she felt when her "two oldest sons, Nadab and Abihu, strode up to the altar in what they may have thought was an imitation of their father, the High Priest. . . . How long had they been planning their subterfuge? What did they think would happen?. . . . When I saw them struck down, my spirit briefly left me and went to be with them. My boys had come from my womb and now they were returning to the earth's womb." [Her sons were killed by God for bringing "a strange fire" to be sacrified.]

Merle and I then turned to the chapters which have HER Hebrew names: Miriam and Rachel, and studied those. We both were shaken by the poetic description "in Miriam's own words" of how she (purportedly) responded when the Hebrews arrived on the other side of the sea, after its miraculous parting:

When my feet touched dry land, I felt such profound gratitude, uncertainty, relief, and fear. Then I had to choose. With all those feelings grappling for dominance, which would triumpth? I chose gratitude. I knew that we could die in the wilderness, but at that moment, we were alive and safe. Dayenu. . . . And then the water closed over the charioteers and their horses, and any path back to Egypt was cut off forever. So what now? We dance. Not because the enemies have died. They too are the children of God. Not because the future is easy. No, because we are here now, surrounded by loved ones, witnessing the greatest miracle of our lives against all the odds. We dance.

Wonderful. The "Miriam" chapter was written by Marsha Pravder Mirkin, a clinical psychologist, resident scholar at Brandeis, and published author, and it's one of the best in the book. Many chapters are far more prosaic; some are dull.

Still, what a fine, moving, and, yes, empowering, book this is—and not only for women, or men with daughters. Praise Her Works: Conversations with Biblical Women is truly the perfect Bat Mitzvah gift, and a superb work to use with study groups of any gender. It will never be Oprah's Choice, or make a best-seller list. But I am so glad that it exists; so pleased that I read it, and was enriched by it.

Nothing Sacred
by Douglas Rushkoff, Crown Publishers, 2003, 260 pp.

Reviewed by Baruch Sienna

"Mr. Rushkoff, can we talk indeed?" I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable and committed Jew, and yet, more often than I would like, I walk out of many synagogue services feeling disappointed, frustrated (and sometimes even worse). And it's not because I'm intimidated by rabbis (I'm married to one), or unfamiliar with the service (my Hebrew is fluent), or don't 'get' how liturgy works (I have a degree in Jewish studies). So imagine how someone who is trying to reconnect to Judaism, but without this background, might react. I understand deeply why many with a committed and yet a critical approach to Judaism have yet to find a spiritual home. I am fond of quoting Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg: "I don't care what denomination you belong to, as long as you're embarrassed by it."

So, it was re-affirming to read an analysis of how Judaism has, in Mr. Rushkoff's words, "lost the plot." He says something similar to Yitz, "Religion is a good thing- as long as you don't believe in it." In other words, Judaism has a lot to offer the modern world, but we have to be careful not to take things too literally. I think one of the more valuable lessons of Nothing Sacred is its stress on how we confuse metaphors with the real thing. As a Jewish educator I have tried very hard to teach kids in ways that won't have to be untaught. And as faculty at Kolel, where we have an approach that I think Mr. Rushkoff would admire, we are (unfortunately, too often) constantly puncturing people's myths about the origins of customs or the meanings of stories (such as our "The True Story of Chanukah").

Mr. Rushkoff is no scholar and the book suffers from errors (Tziporrah watering her horses just to name one, but there are many others) and oversimplification. It is not fair or accurate to distill 3000 years of Judaism into Iconoclasm, Radical Monotheism, and Social Action. The midrash of Abraham's iconoclasm (as he points out), is in fact NOT in Torah, so to claim it as one of the main pillars of Judaism seems a stretch. His assertion that "assimilation was not a sin, it was survival" is simply unfounded in Jewish history. He has a tendency for overblown rhetoric, such as his conclusion that Judaism's evolving theology is only to wean humanity from believing in God altogether. Is that what Maimonides really meant? And for someone who preaches a Judaism of tolerance, he seems mighty intolerant at times.

Sometimes, I'm afraid, he is just too provocative. I would agree that there are some Jews who have confused the 'label' with the 'contents', but it cannot be seriously argued that the 'lapsed' assimilated Jew is the true inheritor of our faith and the future of Judaism. Yes, lots of Jews are homophobic, racist and sexist, but one doesn't need to be pro-intermarriage either! And I believe Mr. Rushkoff would agree, that a Jew can be committed to Social Action AND have a place for ritual and mitzvot in their lives - a position that he does not sufficiently acknowledge.

He is right, however, about the proliferation of 'idols' even within the observant community. It is indeed a provocative concept that the Western Wall, the Mitzvot and even the Torah have been reduced to 'idols' on some levels. (And don't even get us started on the Lubavitcher Rebbe!!) While he has been studying with some of the top rabbis and teachers, he is no authority on Judaism, so the book is his 'midrash' on Jewish history. His analyses (borrowed from his field of media and technology) of Jewish sociology are bang on the mark. I enjoyed reading his insights from his work in media and contemporary life to Judaism and how it is perceived and 'marketed' to a new generation. As Kolel's director of Interactive Technology, I particularly relate to his use of computer metaphors, describing Judaism as 'open source' software. (When I read the book, and his recommendations, my first reaction was, he needs to have an open forum website to continue the conversation, which I was pleased to learn that he has done (called OpenSourceJudaism). To continue the metaphor, though, Open Source software is for geeks; not many average users have Linux installed. Like the new Macintosh operating system (OS X) which sits on (and hides) a kernel of Unix, we need a user-friendly "Jewish" interface and a manual for the equivalent of Jewish 'luddites'.

Mr. Rushkoff is not the first to suggest that Judaism is in (desperate) need of a renaissance. People like Arthur Waskow and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi have spent their lifetimes working for that goal. Kolel opened in 1991 because of visionaries who recognized, and still recognize, that one path to a new Judaism will be built by a community engaged in passionate study of classical texts while grappling with modern ideas. But unlike the terribly unfair review (published in The Jerusalem Report) I don't think anyone who criticizes Judaism is a self-hating Jew and therefore automatically deserves out-of-hand dismissal. Actually, I thought Mr. Rushkoff comes off as a fairly serious Jew. While highly critical of some movements and institutions, he presents Judaism as something with great value, that needs to take a good hard look at itself.

The book is not meant to be scholarly, and has a comfortable, easy to read style. And Mr. Rushkoff has the challenge of needing to explain much of Jewish history and concepts parenthetically as he correctly assumes that the average reader has little familiarity with the people, events and processes that he is describing. Consequently, he is repetitive at times, and simplistic at others. As he necessarily explains, he cannot be prescriptive- only together can we come up with that process. But he has begun a discussion that I, for one, would be happy to be part of. Thanks Mr. Rushkoff, for inviting us to talk.

Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls
by Stephanie Wellen Levine, New University Press, 2003

Reviewed by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein


When I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University, I decided to do my honors thesis on The Role of Women in Old World Religious Orders. That brought me to live one week with the Mennonites of "Pennsylvania Dutch" country, and one week with Lubavitcher Hasidim in Crown Heights. The young girls of the Mennonites were blunt: "In our religion, it's clear. Men and women are not equal. Men are the head and women are the helpers. Men run the church, the business, and the society, and women run the home. Nobody tries to be equal. " Then I went to Crown Heights. Everywhere I went, people tried to match me up with "former" Reform Jews, who told me how much happier they were now as women. The young girls equivocated: "We are separate but equal. We are definitely equal in God's sight, but we have different roles to play, different rules. It might seem unequal to you as an outsider, but it isn't." The last interview I had became the title of my thesis. This young ba'alat teshuva (newly religious) girl said to me, "Now I am free- of the need to be free."
Are the young girls whom Stephanie Wellen Levine met in her year in Crown Heights "free of the need to be free"? Unfortunately, she does not go deep enough into analyzing their lives to answer that question. Her book Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls sets out to see if Hasidic girls are able to "cultivate their inner voices" by interviewing seven girls in the Lubavitch community. She got the best and brightest ones, to be sure. And she has prejudices, like most modern feminists, assuming these girls would be squashed, one-dimensional, oppressed creatures. To her surprise, she finds them feisty, spirited, independent, clear, and insightful. They have strong, wonderful friendships. They are bold, but not brazen. She meets the rebels among them and presets them with a colourful stroke. We are taken into this somewhat closed world (though among the Hasidim, the Lubavitchers are certainly the most worldly and open) and given insights into its richness. She exposes the reader to the underlying strength of the girls' convictions that their lives matter, and that each person is valued. It is that spiritual strength that gives the girls their clear "inner voices." The interviews are entertaining and full. She relates the fights as well as the beauty, and shares the pain of the "outsiders" of the community. She is impressed by the sweet teasing and easy comraderie between the girls. In the end, she even makes a convincing argument for gender-segregated activities among adolescents and calls for a move away from the sex-soaked atmosphere that most teens inhabit. She takes the best of Crown Heights sex-segregation- the fact that it allows girls freedom from the demands of always being attractive and accessible to boys- and tries to imagine some form of it in our non-Hasidic, egalitarian world. She isn't altogether successful in that, though, because she doesn't analyze the difference between chosen separation and enforced separation; between taking leadership in a small group of girls and the inability to take leadership for one's entire community; and between individual girls benefiting from periods of separation from boys and an entire system based on the deep-seated belief that male and female are so inherently different that that one difference must inform what they can and cannot do every day of their lives.

The book may not satisfy an intellectual reader with more than a voyeuristic curiosity about how this "exotic" Jewish community lives. Let's admit that many Jews have a marked fascination for how "they" live and what "they" think and why "they" do certain things, thus the popularity of books like Holy Days and Boys 'N The Hood. The author admits: "I will escort you through the girls' lives and minds more for the pure delight of knowing them than for any lessons you might glean." But with a foreword by Carol Gilligan, a foremost researcher whose work In A Different Voice inspired an entire generation to understand masculinity and femininity in a profoundly analytical way, I had hoped for a deeper quest. How does being raised in a spiritual community with such clear and marked gender differentiation impact upon the life of a young girl? This lack of analysis mars the book for readers who want to understand how, in the twenty-first century, a life of traditional values, clear patriarchy and gender obsession is balanced with an independence of spirit. She admits: "..."there is little place for the person who falls beyond basic assumptions about belief, desire, or personality." But she never seems to ask whether those basic assumptions are the problem, or whether the person's own quirks and personality are the problem.

Levine does a splendid job of presenting how the girls cope, and she paints vivid pictures of Shabbat around their family tables. But after a while, it gets repetitive. For example, she explains how all the Bais Rivka girls get invited to each other's weddings at least three times; every time she describes an engagement party she tells us this fact again. She explains Lubavitch philosophy over and over again. She spends too much time describing the foods, the houses, the neighbourhood, and the small talk and not enough time probing the questions and assumptions of her subjects.

She is unapologetic about her lack of desire to become a ba'alat teshuva even after a year with the strongest Jewish outreach group in the world. I was grateful to see her acknowledge that "...I may have received a somewhat packaged vision of the truth, a movie version as opposed to messy, haphazard lives." Let's face it, that's what outreach is. She calls herself "an extremely sympathetic skeptic" and indeed she portrays the girls, even the so-called "troubled" ones (who wear short skirts or go to secular colleges) very sympathetically, because they are, truly, nice girls. It's great to meet so many nice teenagers, though there are many nice teenagers in the non-Hasidic world, too, contrary to the misty-eyed view that only cloistered kids come out with strong values. Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers is a little misty-eyed too, but it's nice reading about nice people trying to make this world a little nicer.

Keeping Passover: Everything You Need to Know to Bring the Ancient Tradition to Life & Create Your Own Passover Tradition
by Ira Steingroot, Harper Collins Canada 1995

Reviewed by Rabbi Loevinger

If you really want to research, reconstruct, rethink, reconceive, renovate, redo, revitalize and rejuvenate your Passover seder, then you really need to get the book Keeping Passover: Everything You Need to Know to Bring the Ancient Tradition to Life & Create Your Own Passover Tradition, by Ira Steingroot. Mr. Steingroot is apparently some sort of Passover fanatic; I’m not referring to how he cleans his house, but how much he knows about seders, haggadot, customs, foods, and related traditions. This is fun and very useful book, in which Steingroot discusses the structure of the traditional seder in great detail, gives advice on preparing your home and dealing with Passover foods, provides a comprehensive bibliography of different haggadot one might choose, offers helpful ideas about how to keep children involved and happy, brings in recipes from different Jewish communities, and peppers the book throughout with both a pluralistic sensibility and random interesting bits of Jewish trivia related to all kinds of topics.

Although the sheer size of Keeping Passover might seem daunting to newcomers or those not ready to go on an extensive Passover research mission, it’s a very readable book, and one can easily just peruse the sections that seem most interesting. (Not everybody needs to go through a 30 page annotated review of haggadot. ) I would also add that it’s refreshing to find a readable, interesting book, with a pluralistic perspective, that does go into some detail about a specific Jewish topic- after all, people write books about much narrower subjects than Passover, which is a major part of a major religious tradition.

My final thought on Keeping Passover is that even with the level of detail and analysis that this book has, it too might only be a stepping stone for further learning and experimentation. Steingroot’s perspective on the rituals and structure of the seder is interesting, but there are others, across the Jewish spectrum, and one might go from the base of knowledge he provides to looking at other haggadot and commentaries (which he lists) to keep this most ancient ritual fresh and exciting every new spring.

Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction by Joseph Dan
Hardcover - 144 pages (2005), Oxford University Press US; ISBN: 0195300343

Reeviewed by Allan Gould

If numbers were truly important, then the Jewish people—a small fraction of one-per cent of the world's population—are not important. But we know that they are, and always have been, central to human history, culture, thought and destiny. If length is important, then any thousand-page novel is of far greater cultural value than, say, a 100-page theatrical script (such as, say, Hamlet or King Lear). Also untrue.

So, what to say about a thin little book called Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, which is barely over 100 pages in length? There's lots to say, because the author is Joseph Dan, the Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who also teaches at Harvard Divinity School—surely one of the top handful of scholars of this extraordinary topic in the world today. This recent Oxford University Press volume is simply wonderful: insightful, concise, witty, a pleasure to read and a joy to re-read and contemplate.

Interestingly, the word kabbalah comes from the Hebrew, meaning "to receive," as in the 'received tradition.' Professor Dan wittily points out in his opening chapter ("Kabbalah: The Term and Its Meanings") that every hotel in Israel displays the word "Kabbalah," meaning "reception," in its lobby; so much for a "mystical" term in everyday life in the Holy Land!. Kabbalah also means 'bill' (as in receipt) in modern Hebrew. Ther term is also used frequently in Orthodox Jewish circles at their weddings, where the "Kabbalat Panim"—to view the bride just before the wedding ceremony—is central to this special event.

Now, how on earth can one "cover" such a complex subject as Kabbalah in so few pages? Simple. By sharing with us the insights gleaned from a lifetime of scholarship in as few, well-chosen words as possible—along with a dozen lovely illustrations. Someone with less knowledge of this giant topic than Dr. Dan would probably need thousands of pages, but how many would choose to pick up a massive text like that? So, barely a few sentences into this lovely work, we get profound and thought-provoking lines such as these: "The kabbalah, according to the kabbalists, is never new; it can be newly discovered or newly received, but essentially it is millennia-old divine truth. Scholars, of course, hold the opposite view. From the point of view of historians of ideas and historians of religion, the kabbalah is a new phenomenon, which first appeared in southern Europe in the last decades of the twelfth century." No, this is no work of debunking; it is serious and respectful scholarship—yet "modern" enough to refer to the dangerous move of the Lubavitch community toward believing (in shockingly large numbers) that their recently-deceased leader, Menachem Mendel Shneersohn, may actually be the Messiah, and to describe the silly flirtation of such "super-stars" as Madonna with Kabbalah as an example of its enduring (if shallow) power to gain and obsess followers.

At times, the author can be almost laugh-out-loud funny, as in this sentence: "A common denominator, I believe, of answers to the question 'What is kabbalah?' is that the kabbalah is something that I have a vague notion of, but somebody, somewhere, knows exactly what it means." Professor Dan reminds us that the term has often denoted "secret, dark, and evil intentions" (think of the word "cabal" in English), and in current Hebrew spoken in Israel, "kabbalist" and "magician" are almost identical in meaning (!) This tiny book is overflowing in sometimes surprising, even shocking gems: that there were no Jewish or Muslim "mystics" until the 19th century. That the Hebrew term "shekhinah"—nearly always seen as the feminine aspect of Gd—had, into the late 12th century, "no hint of. . .being feminine." That Kabbalah had great impact on Christian and Muslim thought as well.

There are beautiful (and joyfully-brief) descriptions of the impact of Kabbalah on early modern Hassidic thought (from the Baal Shem Tov on); the evil rise (and fall) of Shabbtai Tzvi, Jacob Frank and other disastrous false messiahs of the 17th century (the former converting to Islam when threatened with torture; the latter—after years of grotesque sexual orgies—to Catholicism, and both followed into apostasy by many thousands of "true believers"); how Isaac Luria was able to ask the Really Big Questions which most faiths—and most of us—almost deliberately avoid asking: "Why does God exist? Why did the creation occur? What is meaning of everything?" The answers may inspire you, even enthrall you.

Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction is hardly definitive; it's too short to achieve that, and what single volume could? But this little volume proves, beyond any doubt, that the more a great scholar knows his or her subject, the less words he or she really needs to spend on it. This book is highly recommended, so that if it moves you to fulfill the demand to "Tzay Ul'mad"—go and study—you will have a solid (if brief) foundation to do so, in this irresistible field—which is far, far deeper than Madonna and her followers tying little red ribbons around their wrists. Bravo, Professor Dan.

Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry
by Samuel G. Freedman
Simon and Schuster, N.Y, 2000

Reviewed by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein

No one has to tell me that the Jewish community is fractured, politicized, and torn. As president of the interdenominational Toronto Board of Rabbis, I see it every day. Rabbis who won't speak in the shuls of certain denominations. Rabbis who don't accept conversions of other rabbis. Jews who won't let their kids marry Jews of other denominations. Name calling. Insinuations and outright slander. I've seen and heard it all.

That is why I came to Jew vs. Jew by Samuel G. Freedman with such high hopes. At last a book that will both paint a realistic picture and offer its antidote. A book that will not take sides, but will help us see how the sides which now work against one another can work together. Because here in Toronto, at least, there are small pockets, quiet pockets of people of good will who are hoping for an end to denominational mudslinging and a beginning to dialogue. Such dialogue, however, is based on the deep-seated conviction that we will agree to disagree, and that no one in the end will either "lose" or "win."

I was so sorely disappointed. This best seller depresses. Nowhere does the author speak of his own Jewish identity or commitment, but one gets the feeling that the Judaism he doesn't practice is Orthodox. He intimates in several different ways that liberal Judaism is floundering, and that the most committed liberal Jews eventually become Orthodox. Of all his stories of passionate, articulate secular, Conservative, or reform Jews, they all "convert" to Orthodoxy sooner or later.

In chapter one, Secular Judaism, in the form of Camp Kinderwelt in New York, dies an agonizing death when the "next" generation of camp graduates has a reunion in Manhattan and most of them lament either their own and or their children's lack of Jewish involvement.
In chapter two, The great "conversion experiment" in Denver fails when the Orthodox rabbis feel compromised byt he low level of true observance by their graduates.
In chapters three and four, love of Israel is no longer enough for Jews in the diaspora as an identity factor.,

In the epilogue, Freedman presents his thesis clearly, "In the struggle for the soul of American Jewry, the Orthodox model has triumphed. To say this is not to say the Orthodox themselves have prevailed, or that only the Orthodox denomination will survive on these shores. But the portion of American Jewry that will flourish in the future...is the portion that has accepted the central premise that religion defines Jewish identity." This from a book which promises on its jacket, "...even as it chronicles an embittered and polarized community, it refuses to take sides to pass judgment."

The Five Books of Moses

The Five Books of Moses
by Robert Alter, W.W. Norton & Company

reviewed by Allan Gould


What if you opened a "new translation" of Melville's classic novel Moby Dick and read "Oh, everybody calls me Ishmael; why don't you?"

Of course, that's silly; who would translate English into English? But the longing to translate, from ancient Hebrew into a more modern vernacular, the first portion of the Tanach (a/k/a "The Old Testament" or "The Hebrew Testament," as I prefer to call it)-The Five Books of Moses-has been with us since those very talented, poetic Christian scholars did that exquisite translation-by-committee known as The King James Version exactly four centuries ago.

Translations-scholarly; unpoetic; but often wondrously insightful-of THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES have been coming hot-and-heavy over the past decade from some of the major Hebrew scholars of our era, such as Everett Fox's, and now, Robert Alter's, just published by W.W. Norton & Company, $58 in Canada, $39.95 in U.S. funds, in a stunning slip-cover and a far better, stronger binding than Fox's; my precious copy of the latter is in a dozen pieces now.

To begin at the beginning (pun intended, alas), let's look at the magnificently poetic, memorized-by-billions (but not particularly close to the original Hebrew) opening that King James's workers put out: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters...."

Bravo. Poetry! Here is Everett Fox's from 1995: "At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth,/when the earth was wild and waste,/darkness over the face of Ocean,/rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters-" (I'll leave you in suspense, but here's a clue: the good Lord is about to make an order about turning the lights on).

Now comes Robert Alter's translation of the most famous opening in any book in history (with the exception, perhaps, of "Call me Ishmael" in Moby Dick): "When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters...."

Like, wow, as Britney Spears might say. The King James scholars had a distinct advantage, of course; they weren't tied down to Hebrew scholarship (especially 20th century scholarship); they were freely translating; and they lived and worked during the same decade as a rather well-known Englishman a few miles away was knocking off Hamlet and King Lear, among others plays: in other words, that one-in-every-hotel-room Bible translation known so well was developed at a time when even a poor guy in debtor's prison spoke "poetry" (well, compared with us today).

Fox is wonderful, and I refer to my copy of his translation weekly in my Torah studies. But if we were to base a (rave or harsh) review of the new, Robert Alter translation of THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES on those opening few words alone, one nearly falls in love: "God's breath" is a far-more-satisfying translation of the Hebrew ruach than Fox's awkward "rushing-spirit" (indeed, the latter scholar tends to use hyphens in his "poetry" more often than Jackie Chan uses karate chops in his Kung Fu movies). And, one must add, Alter's "welter and waste and darkness" is also more magical (and eerie) (and poetic) than Fox's earlier translation, "wild and waste"-both of them playing with the same Hebrew tohu-va-vohu.)

Robert Alter is a giant of Hebrew, the Bible, and Hebrew Literature, long a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at U.C., Berkeley. Anyone who had read his Art of Biblical Narrative and Art of Biblical Poetry know what a true genius he is. One would expect greatness from his long-awaited translation of THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES, and one usually gets it. And weighing in at over 1,000 pages-nearly half of them footnotes of grand scholarship based on the Midrash, Talmud and rabbinic commentary through history-it's an admirable achievement.

But how does one approach this epic work? (One could say the same about the original, Hebrew Bible itself, bien sur). It may seem petty, but one of the best ways is for anyone-Biblical scholar or mere studious book reviewer-is to look up some of their favourite phrases, and see what Alter has done with them. In the case of straight translation from the Hebrew, I was satisfied with what he does that wonderful moment in the sedra B'shallach, in which the ancient Hebrews, only days out of Egypt, find themselves caught between a giant body of water (the Sea of Reeds, long-mistranslated as the Red Sea), and the approaching Egyptian army (You remember-lead by Yul Brenner, right?). As a humourist and lecturer on Jewish wit, I love to quote the amazing, viciously sarcastic cry of the terrified Hebrews: in Hebrew, it's AYN KEVARIM B'MITZRAYIM?, and Alter translates it as "Was it for lack of graves in Egypt [a nation and culture which was obsessed with death, the after-life, and rather large pyramids, built with rather cheap Jewish labour] that you took us to die in the wilderness?" I'm happy with Alter's translation, as it captures fairly well the joking nature of the Jews in a near-death situation-something our people would become rather well-known for, in many such life-and-death events over the next three-plus millennia.

But Alter's footnote crushed me in disappointment: "Now we see [the Israelites] as fearful and as recalcitrant as they were at the beginning." Recalcitrant? Feh! I vastly prefer the German footnote of the great 19th century Orthodox scholar Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, who noted "this is the first great example of Jewish humour in the Torah." Now THAT is insight, not Alter's mumblings!

I found similar disappointments in Alter's notes, far too often-as is perhaps inevitable in a massive book with literally thousands of footnotes. Another example, also from the book of Exodus: "...should men brawl and collide with a pregnant woman and her fetus come out but there be no other mishap...." (21:22), which, to me, is a pretty clear statement that, while a man who forces a woman to abort her child deserves financial punishment, it is hardly murder nor should the abuser be punished beyond "the reckoning" of the aggrieved woman's husband. (An argument that could be used by Scott Peterson's lawyer out in Calfornia, perhaps?) Alter's footnote? He refers to the Code of Hammurabi's similar concern "about the liability for induced miscarriages," but Alter shows no awareness whatsoever to the power this line has, in the fight for women's rights to control their own body, and the Bible's (God's?) lack of "mortal" upset over the death of a fetus. I would have liked to see more insight here.

When one approaches a new translation of any text (Dostoyevsky? Melville?) into another language, the longing to track down "old favourites" is almost impossible to resist, but it runs of the risk of a 100,000-word review. Yes, it's intriguing that Alter talks of Pharaoh's heart being "toughened," unlike the King James' justly-famous "hardened." You can look up what he does with the famous "multi-coloured coat" of Joseph. And I could do this a hundred more times with a hundred more best-loved lines.

More important to this critic is what Robert Alter does in many of his interminable (but usually welcome) footnotes (Fox's are often superb, but far, far shorter and fewer), and here are just a handful of one's I wish to highlight: I loved that Alter notes that "the etymological" origin of the word "interest," as your bank gleefully inflicts on your money daily (and that we Jews are forbidden to charge from our "brothers") is "bite." Thanks for that!

But thank you so much more, Professor Alter, for your recognition that the Jewish Bible radiates with laws which are pleasingly, even shockingly, modern, such as Deuteronomy's 21:11, which describes what to do if "you go out to battle against your enemies and...you see among the captives a woman of comely features and you desire her and take her for yourself a wife...." What the ancient Hebrews are told to do, some 3200 years ago-no, ordered to do-is marry her! Yes, "you shall bring her into your house, and she shall shave her head and do her nails, and she shall take off her captive's cloak and stay in your house and keen for her father and her mother a month of days."

Fellow feminists, please rejoice with me over that-and let us not forget the women being raped by the dozens, every hour, during wars taking place around the world at the very moment I am typing these words in my computer in early November, 2004 (Cheshvan, 5765). And God bless Robert Alter for not missing the astonishing kindness shown by the Jewish writer(s?) (God?) in his moving footnote to that wonderful line from the sedra Key Taytze: "Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, captive women of vanquished peoples were assumed to be the due sexual prerogative of the victors (compare Briseus at the beginning of the Iliad). This law exceptionally seeks to provide for the human rights of the woman who falls into this predicament." And, a few footnotes later: "The period of thirty days-the set duration of all mourning-for the keening for the parents she has left behind is another indication that the law encodes a ritual of transition." You read this, and your head shakes over the continued slur by millions of Christians that, while the "New Testament" is "a book of love," while the Hebrew Bible is merely "a book of laws"! Guilty as charged: but what laws are included there! We Jews are still waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to the morality and justice in so many of them.

A translation of what is arguably The Most Important Book in Human History, which probably took decades of the life of one of the past century's most brilliant scholars of Hebrew language and literature, deserves far more than a 1800 word essay. But no one-including the Five Books of Moses, as we all know-ever said that life was fair. (Indeed, it's the very unfairness of life, and the savagery of human beings, which so much of the 613 laws of the Torah are determined to mitigate, soften, and, dare I say it, humanize. (Is it by chance that the order to "be kind to the stranger" because we were strangers in the Land of Egypt is mentioned 36 times in those five books? I think not!)

Robert Alter's THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES is an extraordinary achievement. As was Everett Fox's, nearly a decade ago. As was the deeply-flawed (etymologically) but glorious (poetically) translation by nearly five dozen scholars and priests who slaved over the King James' version, four centuries ago this year.

I am glad that I now possess all three. I shall refer to all of them countless times every year for the rest of my life. And-with many exceptions, of course; we Jews are always complaining about one thing or another; see what we said, when still a raggedy group of recently-freed slaves when we found ourselves trapped between sea and army, above-I love much of what Alter has put into his footnotes. This is a very important new work of scholarship, and one which should be in every Jewish home. Along with Fox's, and the Jewish Publication Society's, and....