Reviews for Reading the Torah Out Loud: A Journey of Lament and Hope

The average rating for Reading the Torah Out Loud: A Journey of Lament and Hope based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-23 00:00:00 Carol Springer Marc Ellis a scholar, philosopher and theologian, the author (years ago) of "Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation." He is about a strongly critical of the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people as it's possible to be - a criticism I share. He and I have become friendly-ish on Facebook, having shared the experience (or perhaps it is jointly having imagined) being run out of opportunities by the Jewish Establishment. I asked him for a couple of his books to read and he recommended this one. It's a kind of theological memoir, tracing the interactions (intellectual and personal, both) he's had during his life with both Jewish post-Holocaust theologians (Richard Rubinstein, David Hartman) and prominent liberation theologians (James Cone, Gustavo Guiterrez). Ellis' increased commitment to liberation theology applied _even to the Palestinians_ becomes a fork in the road: either understate it and be accepted and promoted by the Jewish Establishment, or ... expect to be attacked and vilified and misrepresented and challenged for the rest of your life. He chose the latter. The bulk of the book is an extended thought piece applying the implications of a fully "conscience" based theology to Israel/Palestine. How much is permissible to the Jewish state in the name of the Holocaust, or chosenness, or God's promise the Abraham in the Bible? Why is the Palestinian perspective (my language, not Ellis'; even my language reflects their dehumanization; I would refer to "the blacks" in this way) so thoroughly suppressed and misrepresented. And worst, what does it say about our Judaism that it allows itself to be so manipulated as to defend the worst excesses of military occupation and oppression? A chapter is dedicated to his interactions with the Palestinian scholar and "founding father" type Edward Said. I have seen Ellis refer to himself as having received rabbinic ordination from Said, and that story is told here. The last chapter tells of his "reading the Torah out loud" with his two sons. Because of his alienation from Jewish community, this (aside from their home practice) is as much "Hebrew School" as the kids get. He doesn't use commentators, which is the usual means of interpreting Torah. He tries to experience what it says, unspoiled. Ellis' experiences, and contemporary political affairs, can't help but color how Ellis experiences the Torah. For instance, in the Torah the land of Israel is promised to the Israelites. That's pretty straightforward. But, there is little mention of the corollary threat. The stakes are high. The motivation for Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir comes from these biblical sources and from rabbinic interpretations that highlight these sensibilities. If I read the Torah out loud, should I then be with Goldstein and Amir? And how, if I side with Rabin against them, can I also be critical of Rabin's participation in the origins of the state of Israel when he and others cleansed the Palestinian population from the land? When I do support the state of Israel in its existence today from the perspective of the Holocaust rather than the Bible, is my support coming from my Judaism or from a secular humanism that recognizes a history of Jewish suffering and the need to secure Jews from that threat? [i.e., at all costs, despite the potential costs of "others." - MR] My one critique of the book is that Ellis sometimes over-relies on an artful writing style exemplified by the use of rhetorical questions in the quote above. I find it annoying in his Facebook posts, too. I would have taken off half a star for it if Goodreads let me. I relate very strongly to Ellis' self-perception as an exile within the Jewish community. I also relate to his conclusion that his life and purpose is changed, made more authentic, because of the way Jewish rejection forced him to include others, from all traditions, who share his values into his circle. Those are both experiences I share. And like Ellis, despite the pain, and the financial cost, and the damn inconvenience -- I don't know if I would have chosen this path if I had known what it would entail, but I hope I would have.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-09 00:00:00 Stephen Kronshagen This book is not a slog whatsoever. There are parts where Josephus excels in his story telling. Such as when he describes the Roman Legion's order of battle and what their day to day regime consisted of and why they are the finest fighting force the world has ever seen up to that point, or when Josephus details the distinctions between Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, or when Josephus would drift off into metaphysical meanderings concerning the nature of fate and what that could possibly mean for a people who's history is entwined with prophecies or omens (an owl will mark a Roman Emperor's greatness than will foretell his imminent death according to Josephus or Josephus' own dream tells of his victory). All rulers who were good to the Jews are considered good, and all rulers who were not are considered bad, according to Josephus. The history of Rome usually never considers the world from the perspective of the vanquished; Josephus gives the modern reader a perspective of a beaten people as they were being scattered to the four corners while providing a quotidian struggle of their striving for relevance before only having their history and their religion as a glue to hold them together. BTW, I had not realized how despicable and duplicitous Josephus was even when he writes his story such that to make himself look favorable in the eyes of his fellow Jews, but always being watchful not to offend the Romans. Even in his own words, he comes across as a traitor to his own people. A history like this is always just as important for the history that is being told by the historian and for how we with our modern sensibilities see how the historian is telling his story providing us insight into how they thought about themselves as a snapshot of history. As Giovanni Battista Vico says within his New Science from 1725 one should always consider history through the eyes, times and context of the explicator in order to understand. Josephus' dwelling in detail on the Essenes is fascinating since he writes in a time period such that Christianity if it were considered at all would be mostly considered as a sect of the Jews (70-95 CE). The overlap with who the Essenes were as portrayed by Josephus overlap with how Jesus Christ would be later portrayed by the Gospels especially the Book of John and by the early church fathers far more than I was aware of. Also, I see Josephus really did not like the Epicureans. After one reads about a thousand pages from the same author, one gets a rhyme and reason to the writer's patter and the section that Josephus connects Pontius Pilate to Jesus Christ did not seem to fit the natural flow of Josephus's writing, but the section later on John the Baptist did at least for me. The Jesus section just did not seem to go with what Josephus was trying to tell in his book as a whole. I'll let biblical scholars and the historians fight it out among themselves, and suspect a good philologist can resolve the point, but overall, it's not really that important one way or another. Particularly in the 'Jewish Wars', Josephus thinks himself worthy of a Thucydides (for those who don't know, Thucydides wrote the best history ever 450 years before Josephus and all historians of Josephus time period would have been familiar with it as all historians should be today) and tries to recreate speeches never said while being true to intent. He somewhat fails at this. He only sees one side of the argument and they are often tied up with him wanting to please his Roman masters while denigrating his Jewish brethren, those he claims he was fighting for. Obviously, Josephus risked real physical harm if he strayed too far from offending the Romans and would always err on the side of self preservation and the Romans. The end notes from 1757 of this 1737 translation of a first century Jewish historian make this book worthwhile by themselves. They were as much fun as reading as the text itself. They took themselves incredibly seriously and they took it as a given that if the bible says it, it is true. The remnants of Noah's ark are still available to visit according to them. There was one Tolstoy type allusion in this book. Tolstoy in War and Peace would say that Russia won the war against France because Napoleon's barber was sick and gave his cold to Napoleon thus making Napoleon not able to lead his army properly. Josephus tells a story of an unnamed Roman soldier a year or two before the complete destruction of Jerusalem who showed his private parts as an insult in front of the temple and that led to the ultimate revolt by the Jews against the Romans. Who knows if it's true? History is often defined by the inconsequential, and by the way, according to Josephus that soldier was beheaded by the Romans. Everything that was in the Jewish War and the Jewish Antiquities was covered better and more reliably by Heinreich Graetz's Volume I and II of The History of the Jews written in about 1860. Graetz never assumes the truth of divine intervention, or prophets, or omens or dreams while Josephus accepts them at face value, and Graetz considers Josephus' account of Masada as a complete fabrication not worthy of refutation even.