Reviews for The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe

The average rating for The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-15 00:00:00 Taralimbu Taralimbu I liked this book, which was recommended to me by a retired rabbi I hang out with sometimes. I am a little sceptical about the romanticisation of the lifestyle and treatment of Jews in Eastern Europe that led to this. But on the other hand, it is a beautiful depiction of the rewards of intellectual and religious commitment, and the writing is as always lovely. --- QUOTES I LIKED OR THOUGHT WERE INTERESTING --- "What [the Ashkenazic moralist or Hasid] sought was boundless fervor, praying and learning without limit or end." (34) "Kept spiritually alive by a sense of the immense rather than by a sense of balance, he would not yield to the admonitions of the few systematically minded scholars in his midst. The passion for the unlimited could not be conditioned by a regard for proportion and measure." (36) "In the eyes of these people, knowledge was not a means for achieving power, but a way of clinging to the source of all reality." (49) "Study was a technique of sublimating feeling into thought." (52) "It is easy to belittle such an attitude of mind and to call it unpractical, unworldly. But what is nobler than the unpractical spirit? The soul is sustained by the regard for that which transcends all immediate purposes. The sense of the transcendent is the heart of culture, the very essence of humanity. A civilization that is devoted exclusively to the utilitarian is at bottom not different from barbarism. The world is sustained by unworldliness." (55) "Man has not advanced very far from the coast of chaos. A frantic call to disorder shrieks in the world. Where is the power that can offset the effect of that alluring call? The world cannot remain a vacuum. We are all either ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil. The only safeguard against constant danger is constant vigilance, constant guidance." (63) "There is a price to be paid by the Jew. He has to be exalted in order to be normal. In order to be a man, he has to be more than a man. To be a people, the Jews have to be more than a people." (64) "The meaning of a man's life lies in his perfecting the universe. He has to distinguish, gather and redeem the sparks of holiness scattered throughout the darkness of the world." (72)

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-30 00:00:00 Steffen Posch So, about 15-16 years ago, I was extremely interested in mysticism, including the kabbalah. A friend recommended a couple of books by Heschel: The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man , which I liked reasonably well, and this, which is self-congratulatory bullshit propaganda. I guess there's a chance I would have liked it OK if I'd gotten around to reading it when I bought it in 1998.... But I hope I would have known even then what's wrong with passages like this: It was not by accident that the Jews of Eastern Europe thought little of worldly education. They resisted the stream of enlightenment which threatened to engulf the small province of Jewishness. They did not despise science. They believed, however, that a bit of spiritual nobility was a thousand times more valuable than all the secular sciences, that praying three times a day "My God, guard my tongue from evil" was more important than the study of physics, that meditating upon the Psalms filled man with more compassion than the study of Roman history. In other words, they were every bit as anti-intellectual, insular, and parochial as redneck American Christians, and there ain't nothing admirable, worth emulating, or even interesting in that.