Bringing It All Together

By JUDITH BOLTON-FASMAN

THE BEST JEWISH WRITING 2003
Wisdom and Enlightenment for Troubled Times
Edited by Arthur Kurzweil.
380 pages. Jossey-Bass. $19.95.

An anthology billed as "The Best of" anything has much to live up to. Given the inherent inclusiveness of anthologies, the quality of entries can be very uneven. There are, of course, exceptions, and happily The Best Jewish Writing 2003 is one of them. Edited by Rabbi Arthur Kurzweil, the essays, poems, and stories in this volume offer a penetrating and intelligent look at issues ranging from the effects of the second Intifidah in Israel, to religious education and practice, to Jewish humor.

The book goes beyond its subtitle's promise to extend wisdom and enlightenment for troubled times. It presents an optimism tempered by history—an optimism that is uniquely Jewish. Kurzweil’s inclusiveness not only makes this a timely collection, but a timeless one as well.

Kurzweil is especially adept at balancing timeliness and timelessness in the section on Israel. When it comes to the subject of the Jewish homeland, the old joke about the two Jews and their three opinions quickly loses its humor. But Kurzweil’s careful editing avoids those sorts of skirmishes and clichés. Joseph Alpher builds a quiet, forceful argument for Jewish claims to the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile, Arthur Waskow effectively argues that there is a Talmudic exemption for fighting in a war. His erudition on the subject is in service to a group of Israeli reservists who detail their refusal to serve in the territories in a letter titled "Courage to Refuse."

A Jewish abhorrence for violence is also featured in Daniel Polish’s cogent essay on capital punishment. Polish summons the Talmud to point out that the notion of "an eye for an eye" only exists "in the realm of theoretical speculation, just as—after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem—all the laws of sacrifice were retained and studied long after the sacrifices ceased to be offered."

Paula Hyman’s essay, in which she highlights the requisites for becoming an educated Jew, presents the concept of an "open canon." According to Hyman, the continual, evolving interpretations of texts and laws realistically works in Judaism because "the traditional Jewish system of interpretation of classical texts has provided a mechanism for ongoing revisionism. … A truly ‘open canon’ affords opportunities for choice and for the inclusion of ongoing cultural creativity." But Hyman warns that this dynamic intellectual enterprise is all for naught unless Jews have a strong, common background in Hebrew, text, and history. While Hyman envisions a Judaism that is fluid, she is clear that it must be embedded in tradition in order to ensure Jewish continuity.

In her affecting essay, "Creating a Moral Legacy for Our Children," Susan Berrin demonstrates that Jewish continuity is a sacred parental obligation. She goes beyond the familiar expectations set up by the Fifth Commandment and asserts that honoring parents can only occur when there is good parenting already in place. Berrin writes that one of the hallmarks of "being a parent is an affirmation of one of Judaism’s most important values—hope." She advocates a hope that promotes possibility and change; a hope that is essential to bringing up children as committed Jews and honorable people.

A section simply called "9/11" stands in the middle of the book like a tombstone. Beneath the hard, chiseled surface of grief, Benjamin Blech ponders the issue of forgiveness in general and who in particular has the right to forgive the terrorists. To shed light on this conundrum he refers to legendary stories in which Simon Weisenthal and the esteemed late 19^th century rabbi, the Chafetz Chaim, could not in good Jewish conscience forgive their tormentors. Rabbi Avi Weiss steps back from the horror of 9/11 and sees a "congregation of Holy souls"—dead and alive—coming together at the "makom kodesh," the holy place that is Ground Zero.

Kurzweil has also brought together an impressive group of writers on the topic of Kabbalah. In a piece affectionately and ironically entitled "The Heretic," Cynthia Ozick draws a complete and highly memorable portrait of Gershom Scholem, the renowned scholar and originator of modern academic study of Kabbalah. Ozick details Scholem’s upper middle class life in Germany with his anti-Zionist father, from whom he eventually had to break away. At the heart of the essay, Ozick reveals that Scholem’s scholarship reflected more than a genius at work. "He was," she writes, "not a man penetrating a field of learning: he was a field of learning penetrating the world."

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, contributes a detailed and intricate essay on Kabbalistic concepts that is astonishingly clear and riveting. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi explains that the Kabbalist experienced the ten sephirot [i.e., divine emanations of the Godhead], as part of a larger pattern in which the infinite invests itself in this finite world. He also locates the erotic underpinnings of holy gratitude that are manifested when making a blessing, explaining that these are perfectly natural inclinations. In his estimation a blessing or bracha truly takes effect “when all the chambers of the body vibrate with it.”

Perhaps evoking Kabbalistic concepts is one way to read this eclectic anthology. Kabbalah, says the poet and Kabbalah enthusiast Rodger Kamenetz, instructs "that the soul of the Torah is deeper than analytics…I know that the scholarly intellectual way of reading Torah so common today only breaks the text down into bits, and that there’s a deeper way of reading: a way that performs tikkun on the text and finds the light hidden in the text."

One way to perform tikkun on the great text that is contemporary Judaism, and to repair misconceptions or misinterpretations of its message, is to gather the many conflicting voices and arguments together and consider them as one. Arthur Kurzweil has surely done that in the 2003 edition of Best Jewish Writing.