Legends for Our Time

By JUDITH BOLTON-FASMAN

FIVE CITIES OF REFUGE
Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy
By Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet.
176 pages. Schocken Books. $21.

Several years ago I attended a Simchat Torah service in which an entire Torah scroll was unfurled. It was an awesome sight to behold the fifty-four Torah portions flowing into each other. It evoked the Kabbalistic notion that the Messiah will one day “teach us to pronounce the entire Torah as one long, uninterruptible name of God.” That’s one of the jewels of Jewish lore in David Mamet’s brilliant, eclectic observations on the weekly Torah portion.

Five Cities of Refuge is the result of weekly study sessions between Mamet and his teacher Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. Mamet is a filmmaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Rabbi Kushner is a venerable teacher, author, and expert on Jewish mysticism and related subjects. The book’s title comes from a story in the Book of Numbers which designates six cities as places of refuge for people who have committed accidental murder. In choosing their metaphor,  Kushner and Mamet convey that there are many motivation for the formulation of Torah commentary, some of them more readily understood than others.

While the parshiyot (the weekly Torah portions) stand as individual stories, cumulatively they are the fabric of Judaism. The readings are synchronized with the Jewish calendar. Rabbi Alan Lew, an inspiring teacher and writer, sees the calendar and Torah readings as “the two great spiritual cycles of Judaism” in which “we feel both the sun and the moon in our lives.” Another metaphor for these cycles is the interdependence of heart and soul. The metaphor is most vivid on Simchat Torah when the annual cycle of Torah readings is completed and then started again. The last letter of the Torah is the letter lamed ("L") ending Yisrael ("Israel"). The first letter of the Torah is bet ("B") as in Beresheit ("In the beginning"). Together the letters form the Hebrew word Lev, meaning "heart."

The Kushner/Mamet duo locate the beating heart of the Torah in Moses, whose lifeblood was the “conduit for the divine voice rather than religious innovator.” Moses dies like any other human—his physical heart stops beating. But his death hardly signals closure. “The Torah,” asserts Mamet, “may be interpreted and reinterpreted but it cannot be completed.”

While Kushner and Mamet do not directly address one another’s interpretations, they seem to inspire each other. In the first chapter of Genesis, Rabbi Kushner meditates on God’s ineffable name—yod, hey, vav, hey, ("YHWH"). The name has its roots in the Hebrew verb “to be.” He cites mystical traditions which explain “that what is wrong with our present world must therefore be traceable to a corresponding defect in the Name itself. The letters are broken apart from one another. Something on high is fractured. And the ultimate task of humanity is through right action and right intention, to bring them together again.” In considering the first chapter of Genesis Mamet walks among those broken letters and surmises that, “The Torah counsels that there is no ‘closure,’ and that this lack is not to be decried but, in fact, celebrated.”

THE BEDSIDE TORAH
Wisdom, Vision, and Dreams
By Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson.
362 pages. Contemporary Books. $16.95.

Rabbi Bradley Artson also celebrates the Torah’s unique and holy open-endedness in his lovely companion book to the weekly parshiyot, The Bedside Torah: Wisdom, Vision, and Dreams. Rabbi Artson, Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and Vice-President of the University of Judaism, encourages his readers to conjure the revelation of Sinai by imagining that “the moment of the giving of the Torah is renewed every time Jews take the Torah out of the Ark, carry it among the congregation, and sing its words.”

Rabbi Artson presents three interpretations, or as he calls them “takes,” on each of the parshiyot which correspond to the three times the parsha is read during the week. These brief commentaries are peppered with references to pop culture, philosophy, and literature. In Genesis’s Parshat Toldot or Generations, Rabbi Artson sees Esau as “a man of impulse. Like Rambo or the heroes played by Arnold Schwartzenegger, Esau thrives on his tremendous power, his physical courage, and his own inner drives.” Esau is the prototype of the modern America hero for whom passion is more valued than scholarship. But Rabbi Artson also reads the story of Esau and Jacob as a cautionary tale about human nature. “For the Torah, every aspect of being human—heart, mind and soul—needs constant training, direction and restraint. The story of Esau and Jacob is exactly the story of these two conflicting events.”

THE WOMEN'S TORAH COMMENTARY
New Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Torah Portions
Edited by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein.
474 pages. Jewish Lights. $34.95.

The women whom Rabbi Elyse Goldstein brings together in The Women’s Torah Commentary offer a stunning variety of feminist commentary on the parshiyot. Many of these commentaries or midrashim are autobiographical, locating the female voices and viewpoints in the Torah. It’s an approach which demonstrates that feminist readings of the Bible do not alter fundamental truths, but expand upon them.

For example Rabbi Shoshana Gelfand, a Conservative rabbi, makes way for women by reading Vayikra, or the Book of Leviticus as a book of relationships, a description normally reserved for the more action-packed Genesis. The third book of the Bible is a technical manual for priests on how to perform sacrifices, but Rabbi Gelfand’s commentary explains that sacrifices were integral “to creating and maintaining relationships between people and God.”

LEGENDS OF THE JEWS
By Rabbi Louis Ginzburg.
Johns Hopkins University Press. Six volumes, $22.95 each. 1650 page new edition, $150.

When it comes to midrash, Rabbi Louis Ginzburg’s definitive and magnificent compendium, The Legends of the Jews, is the granddaddy of them all. When he died in 1953, Rabbi Ginzburg was recognized as the world’s leading authority on the Talmud, a subject he taught with unparalleled distinction for more than half a century at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In six volumes, two of which are devoted to Rabbi Ginzburg’s sources, these doorstop books present stories and anecdotes that fill in the telling gaps of silence inherent in the Torah. All of the famous stories are here, strung together in a cohesive narrative that evokes its own version of the Kabbalistic notion of the Torah as one long name for God. In these books midrash is a bridge across the blank spaces of text that leads to story, metaphor, and insight.

While the breadth of the Torah was magnificently displayed when it was unfurled on Simchat Torah, its depth is captured in the Mishnah’s imperative to “turn it, turn it, turn it, for everything is found in it.” A corollary of that could be to interpret it, interpret it, interpret it, for there is something for everyone in it.

— Judith Bolton-Fasman

PRI MAYIM CHAYIM
By David Herzberg
Edited by Chaim Richman
141 pages. Shir l’Shlomo: The Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach Foundation.

This volume consisting of brief commentaries on the weekly Torah reading was published posthumously Erev Tu B’Av 5763 (2003) on the first Yahrtzeit of the author. David Herzberg was one of the late Shlomo Carlebach's most gifted followers. These commentaries reflect his deep knowledge in Hasidut. They are infused with that spirit of love and blessing with which Rav Dovid approached every person he met. They are very much in the tradition of another Hasidic teacher, the Ohev Yisrael, the Apter Rebbe, in that they throughout seek to find the good points, the ways of seeing the positive in the people of Israel. This work is not only rich in Torah insights, it also makes them accessible through the special storytelling powers of the author. A highly inspiring and most recommended work.

— Shalom Freedman