Word: lifeness
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...novel’s flashback plotline explains how Seltzer came to write such a book, recounting his trajectory from life as a long-suffering graduate student in the humanities to becoming personally concerned with matters of faith. Under the tutelage of Jonas Elijah Klapper—a Harold Bloom caricature—Cass visited New Walden, a cloistered Hasidic enclave where men and women walk on different sides of the street and modernity has yet to intrude. There Cass meets Azarya, a child prodigy who at the age of six has derived complex mathematical proofs without any formal education...
...Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, at the London Jewish Book Festival, Goldstein’s husband, Harvard icon Steven Pinker, did in 2005. These adapted details of academia make Goldstein’s story that much more compelling, and her not infrequent satirical skewers of modern university life that much more biting...
When it comes to sketching Jewish tradition, and the life of New Walden’s Hasidim, however, Goldstein’s understanding is slightly weaker. She gets the names of Hasidic customs wrong—dubbing the mystical Hasidic custom of waiting to cut a boy’s hair until his third birthday an “upshneering” instead of the Yiddish “upsherin”—and her Klapper character deduces the numerical value of his Hebrew name using a form of gematria so obscure that Goldstein is either being very...
...social utility, and then there are the unenlightened masses. Azarya’s situation is similarly rigid—he must choose between living entirely outside modernity or entirely within it, when few such isolated shtetls as New Walden exist and few university students live a life so divorced from the concerns of the spirit...
Goldstein seems to be overlooking the very real people in between her extremes. Where is the celebrated Princeton philosopher Saul Kripke—a real life Azarya, who taught at MIT while a Harvard undergrad, himself an observant Jew and critic of materialism—and where is Harvard’s own Hilary Putnam, who writes on Jewish thought and prays at Harvard Hillel, or Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project and a believing Christian...