Word: midrashic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ourselves. It's like the familiar Barnett Newman problem: having for so long been told that the famous "Zip" in Newman's canvases contains the unnameable name of God or the tragic condition of humankind, one must make an almost perverse effort of will to look past all the midrash and see a vertical stripe...
...Burton Visotzky used to share that simple, exalted view of Abraham and his immediate descendants. "I had always thought of these guys as saints," he says. Not many people in the country are as familiar with the workings of the Bible's first book as Visotzky, an expert in Midrash, the authoritative early rabbinical parsings of Scripture, or Torah. Yet in the late 1980s, an impending divorce led to what the rabbi describes as "a bit of a religious crisis." Suddenly, when he read the Torah aloud in temple, the patriarchs of Genesis seemed all too familiar. Abraham...
...Flood (9: 21), suggested that "as dutiful children, let us cover the nakedness of our fathers in the cloak of favorable interpretation." Something of the sort eventually occurred. The Christian church developed a set of interpretations according to which the patriarchs prefigure Christians as heroes of faith. The Jewish Midrash, although more flexible and occasionally even playful, also strove to harmonize scriptural difficulties. Both approaches were developed as aids to the believer: they worked from the assumption that God's logic was impeccable; only man's understanding was wanting. But readers may miss a chance to identify with the patriarchs...
...discussion dedicated to making its way through the book a chapter at a time. Instead of the academics and rabbis who were his usual conversation partners, however, he stocked the group with an interfaith roster of fiction writers, hoping they might have insight into human character if not into Midrash. "If I could make the patriarchs sacred again," he says, "maybe I could make some sense of my own life...
...disconcerting contribution about playing Abraham in an Abraham-Sarah-Pharaoh triangle and David Mamet's Freudian riff on the Flood make for enjoyable reading. But Rosenberg's thesis is sorely tested by The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (Image), a wonderful book by Living Conversation participant and Orthodox Midrash expert Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Her chapter on the Flood beats Mamet's hands down...