Word: rabbi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Conservative rabbi 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...
...month series called Genesis: A Living Conversation, with Bill Moyers as host. Each of its 10 weekly episodes features a diverse panel grappling with the majestic, infuriating work, engaging both the stupendous acts of faith that inspired Fintel and the moral and ethical zig-zags that bedeviled Rabbi Visotzky. At the same time, a batch of new books, written, for the most part, by Living Conversation panelists, amounts to a modest but unmistakable Genesis revival in American culture. Says Robert Alter, whose masterly new translation of Genesis was published last month: "Moyers has hit upon an idea whose time...
...unruly story lines did not go unremarked upon by early ecclesiastics trying to create systems of Scripture-based faith. St. Jerome, who translated the Word from Hebrew into Latin, grumbled that many of the narratives were "rude and repellent." A medieval rabbi, borrowing an image from the story of Noah's drunken disarray after the 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...
...inclined to read the text in the light of our own 'culture.'" Concludes Mathews: "Are we submitting to the picture of God in Scripture? Or are we putting ourselves over Scripture and rewriting it in terms of our own preferences?" Similar sentiments have been expressed by Orthodox Rabbi Shalom Carmy of New York's Yeshiva University and Moyers panelist and Catholic priest-professor Alexander Di Lella...
...Conservative synagogue Chizuk Amuno will mix with parishioners of Saint Matthew Catholic Church, with its 40% minority membership. Saint Matthew's Father Joseph Muth says he is seeking "an opportunity for folks to see across church and racial lines through discussing these basic stories." Chizuk Amuno's Rabbi Richard Camras concurs. "Everybody sees [the stories] as sacred," he says; their power derives in part from their subject matter, the "jealousy, sibling rivalry, wanting to strike out at your neighbor, the things we face every...