Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy - Hardcover

Kushner, Lawrence; Mamet, David

 
9780805242201: Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0805242201 ISBN 13: 9780805242201
Verlag: Schocken, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

In the ancient Jewish practice of the kavannah (a meditation designed to focus one’s heart on its spiritual goal), Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet offer their own reactions to key verses from each week’s Torah portion, opening the biblical text to new layers of understanding.

Here is a fascinating glimpse into two great minds, as each author approaches the text from his unique perspective, each seeking an understanding of the Bible’s personalities and commandments, paradoxes and ambiguities. Kushner offers his words of Torah with a conversational enthusiasm that ranges from family dynamics to the Kabbalah; Mamet challenges the reader, often beginning his comment far afield—with Freud or the American judiciary—before returning to a text now wholly reinterpreted.

In the tradition of Israel as a people who wrestle with God, Kushner and Mamet grapple with the biblical text, succumbing neither to apologetics nor parochialism, asking questions without fear of the answers they may find. Over the course of a year of weekly readings, they comment on all aspects of the Bible: its richness of theme and language, its contradictions, its commandments, and its often unfathomable demands. If you are already familiar with the Bible, this book will draw you back to the text for a deeper look. If you have not yet explored the Bible in depth, Kushner and Mamet are guides of unparalleled wisdom and discernment. Five Cities of Refuge is easily accessible yet powerfully illuminating. Each week’s comments can be read in a few minutes, but they will give you something to think about all week long.

Lawrence Kushner teaches and writes as the Emanu-El Scholar at The Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco. He has taught at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City and served for twenty-eight years as rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. A frequent lecturer, he is also the author of more than a dozen books on Jewish spirituality and mysticism. He lives in San Francisco.

David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright. He is the author of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Cryptogram, and Boston Marriage, among other plays. He has also published three novels and many screenplays, children's books, and essay collections.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lawrence Kushner teaches and writes as the Emanu-El Scholar at The Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco. He has taught at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City and served for twenty-eight years as rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. A frequent lecturer, he is also the author of more than a dozen books on Jewish spirituality and mysticism. He lives in San Francisco.

David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright. He is the author of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Cryptogram, and Boston Marriage, among other plays. He has also published three novels and many screenplays, children's books, and essay collections.

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In the ancient Jewish practice of the kavannah (a meditation designed to focus one's heart on its spiritual goal), Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet offer their own reactions to key verses from each week's Torah portion, opening the biblical text to new layers of understanding.
Here is a fascinating glimpse into two great minds, as each author approaches the text from his unique perspective, each seeking an understanding of the Bible's personalities and commandments, paradoxes and ambiguities. Kushner offers his words of Torah with a conversational enthusiasm that ranges from family dynamics to the Kabbalah; Mamet challenges the reader, often beginning his comment far afield--with Freud or the American judiciary--before returning to a text now wholly reinterpreted.
In the tradition of Israel as a people who wrestle with God, Kushner and Mamet grapple with the biblical text, succumbing neither to apologetics nor parochialism, asking questions without fear of the answers they may find. Over the course of a year of weekly readings, they comment on all aspects of the Bible: its richness of theme and language, its contradictions, its commandments, and its often unfathomable demands. If you are already familiar with the Bible, this book will draw you back to the text for a deeper look. If you have not yet explored the Bible in depth, Kushner and Mamet are guides of unparalleled wisdom and discernment. Five Cities of Refuge is easily accessible yet powerfully illuminating. Each week's comments can be read in a few minutes, but they will give you something to think about all week long.
Lawrence Kushner teaches and writes as the Emanu-El Scholar at The Congregation Emanu-El of SanFrancisco. He has taught at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City and served for twenty-eight years as rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. A frequent lecturer, he is also the author of more than a dozen books on Jewish spirituality and mysticism. He lives in San Francisco.
David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. He is the author of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Cryptogram, and Boston Marriage, among other plays. He has also published three novels and many screenplays, children's books, and essay collections.

Aus dem Klappentext

In the ancient Jewish practice of the kavannah (a meditation designed to focus one s heart on its spiritual goal), Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet offer their own reactions to key verses from each week s Torah portion, opening the biblical text to new layers of understanding.

Here is a fascinating glimpse into two great minds, as each author approaches the text from his unique perspective, each seeking an understanding of the Bible s personalities and commandments, paradoxes and ambiguities. Kushner offers his words of Torah with a conversational enthusiasm that ranges from family dynamics to the Kabbalah; Mamet challenges the reader, often beginning his comment far afield with Freud or the American judiciary before returning to a text now wholly reinterpreted.

In the tradition of Israel as a people who wrestle with God, Kushner and Mamet grapple with the biblical text, succumbing neither to apologetics nor parochialism, asking questions without fear of the answers they may find. Over the course of a year of weekly readings, they comment on all aspects of the Bible: its richness of theme and language, its contradictions, its commandments, and its often unfathomable demands. If you are already familiar with the Bible, this book will draw you back to the text for a deeper look. If you have not yet explored the Bible in depth, Kushner and Mamet are guides of unparalleled wisdom and discernment. Five Cities of Refuge is easily accessible yet powerfully illuminating. Each week s comments can be read in a few minutes, but they will give you something to think about all week long.

Lawrence Kushner teaches and writes as the Emanu-El Scholar at The Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco. He has taught at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City and served for twenty-eight years as rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. A frequent lecturer, he is also the author of more than a dozen books on Jewish spirituality and mysticism. He lives in San Francisco.

David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. He is the author of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Cryptogram, and Boston Marriage, among other plays. He has also published three novels and many screenplays, children's books, and essay collections.

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Chapter 1

GENESIS / BERESHIT

1. GENESIS 2:1-3 / BERESHIT

And the heavens and the earth and all their hosts were finished. And on the seventh day God finished the work that God had been doing, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work that God had done. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because on it God rested from all the work of creation that God had done.

LK

The four-letter Name of God-yod, hey, vav, and hey-is God's most intimate name. Made from the root letters of the Hebrew verb "to be," originally it probably meant something like the "One who brings into being all that is." It is the ultimate name of being's holiness, the one we must never waste (or, "take in vain"). Jewish mystical tradition explains 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. Such meditations are called yihudim, unifications.

The "vaYechulu (And they were finished)," as the above three verses from Genesis are called, is traditionally chanted as a poetic introduction to the kiddush, or Sanctification prayer, prior to the Sabbath meal. The world-work is done; let us now join God by sanctifying the seventh day. We bless God's work-and our own-by quitting. The work and the rest, together make the world. They are inseparable. (Or at least, if they were, the world-work would truly be complete, redemption at last.)

The chapters in our present Bible are not of Jewish origin. They inadvertently separate the six days of creation of Genesis, Chapter 1, from the "vaYechulu (And they were finished)," of the seventh day in Genesis, Chapter 2. But perhaps that's the way it really is: Our work and our rest are severed, split apart. All too often, they bear little or no relationship to one another. Our world is broken. This, in turn, may explain the cryptic old tradition that appends to the beginning of "vaYechulu (And they were finished)" the last few words of the preceding chapter, ". . . and there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day." The Hebrew for "the sixth day" is yom haShishi. The first letter respectively of each word is yod and hey, which, when joined with the first letter respectively of "And they [the heavens and the earth] were finished . . ." is vav and hey, together spelling yod, hey, vav, and hey, the ineffable Name, the Name of the One who brings into being all that is, the Name of God. At last the sweat and the sigh inseparable.

DM

Closure" is a concept foreign to Jewish tradition. It is an overwhelmingly secular, modern, and arrogant idea-that one, by an act of will, manipulation, or aggression can "complete" a disturbing experience.

This mythical mechanical completion means triumph over: fate, chance, anger, grief, or injustice, and is achievable only through oblivion or repression.

The struggle to deal with an unjust, confusing, incomprehensible world does not impede our life; it is our life.

Bereshit, the very beginning of the Torah, counsels that there is and will be no completion, there is no "closure," and that this lack is not to be decried but, in fact, celebrated.

2. GENESIS 6:9-13 / NOAH

This is the family line of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. Noah fathered three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Now the earth had become defiled before God so that it was filled with violence. And God looked at the earth and, behold, all humanity had defiled its way on the land. So God said to Noah, "I have de-cided to destroy humanity because the earth is filled with violence because of it: Behold, now I will destroy them with the earth."

LK

Rabbinic tradition is conflicted over what to do with Noah. On the one hand, the biblical text describes him as a tzaddik, a righteous man who walked with God. On the other, unlike Abraham and Moses, Noah never protested God's harsh decree-not so much as even one peep. How righteous could a man be who watched the destruction of an entire generation in silence?

Hasidic tradition disdainfully calls Noah a tzaddik im pelz, a righteous man in a fur coat, who, instead of helping others build a fire to warm themselves, just pulls his own coat tighter around himself. When push comes to shove, he only looks out for himself. Indeed, Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tameret has suggested that to stand aboard that ark and witness the end of humanity was Noah's ultimate punishment.

Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev offers a solution based on an insight into the personality of a religious leader. The difference between the two kinds of tzaddikim does not derive from the presence or absence of some special moral fiber. It's not even the result of the instinct for self-preservation. What enables a true tzaddik to rise in the defense of the world-even when that world is uniformly and unrepentantly evil-is an expression of one's own self-worth. Noah, suggests the Berditchever, said to himself, "Who am I to be worthy to challenge God's decree?" And so he did nothing. His failure was his humility. And, even though it is the source of all human wickedness (and would doubtless make Levi Yitzhak cringe), every real tzaddik, sooner or later, needs a little bit of arrogance. A righteous man must believe in the power of his own righteousness.

DM

Tolstoy wrote that there has never been an intelligent man who, looking around him, did not say, "Surely the corruption of the world is such that it must be obliterated soon."

His observation suggests the existence of two human traits: a sense of social order (if present only in outrage at its absence), and a sense of cosmic order-or, say, of the existence of God.

But how can one reconcile these two seemingly opposed human perceptions?

Perhaps they coalesce in the human capacity to ask that very question, which is to say, in the study of Torah.

3. GENESIS 12:1-3 / LEKH-LEKHA

And the Lord said to Avram: "Leave your land, your birthplace, and your parent's home for the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed through you."

LK

The text could have just said, "And Avram set out," or, "God told Avram to go forth." That would have been mythically elegant. But instead, God gets personal. The first thing God says to the first Jew is "leave your parents' home." And as the ancient rabbinic dictum has it: What happens to the parents is already a sign of what will happen to the children.

The great, unending psychospiritual task of every human being is separating from his or her parents. Loved or hated, near or far, living or long dead, it's never done. We spend our days trying to be who we imagine we want to be and not who they wanted us to be. We strive with all our cunning to infuriate them even as we secretly yearn to make them smile and to fulfill their secret dreams. But before we can finish, or even figure out what's going on, we have our own children and the whole thing starts all over again from the other side.

In any case, the text is clear: Doing business with this new, imageless, and as yet unnamed God means to leave home, to commence the struggle, to believe unto your dying breath that you will break free from their orbit. But as you grow older-much older-you would be grateful if you...

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Verlag
Schocken
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0805242201
ISBN 13 
9780805242201
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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