Word: reading
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cultural teaching that forms the heart of . traditional Judaism is contained in the massive sacred book the Talmud. Yet for most Jews that book is closed: without specialized training, it has been impossible to understand it. In a recent poll, 84% of Israeli Jews reported they had never read any of it. The reason is simple: the text is dauntingly complex...
...described "commuter between heaven and earth," Steinsaltz did university work in physics and mathematics rather than rabbinics and had a rigidly secular upbringing in Jerusalem. His father Avraham, a far-left socialist, was an early Zionist and proudly Jewish, but he kept any religious sentiments carefully concealed. Little Adin read Lenin and Freud before his bar mitzvah. Later, however, the family saw to it that he was tutored in the Talmud and attended a religious high school. Explained Avraham: "I don't care if you are a heretic. I don't want you to be an ignoramus...
Once the first Babylonian volume appeared in 1967, opposition among the ultra-Orthodox melted away. Today most Israelis agree with Hebrew University's Shmuel Shilo: "You can now read the Talmud the way any book is read. It is now a popular work." The director of the pluralistic World Union of Jewish Students, Daniel Yosef, says that "Steinsaltz has taken the study of the Talmud out from behind the closed doors of the yeshiva and given...
That was big news. Big news elsewhere, though, often doesn't seem quite so pressing in Ellsworth. The October stock-market crash got one sentence last fall; the blueberry industry, a mainstay of the region, got a five-part series. But nothing is read more closely than the court page, a list of everyone caught speeding or driving tipsy or lobstering without a license. "I want to see if any of my buddies are in there," says Carmen Griffin, a waitress at the Pineland Diner on Main Street. It may be a yawn in Portland, Me., but in Ellsworth...
Opening the brown envelope which contained the press kits for the two films we would be covering in the junket, I read the titles: "Shoot to Kill," and "Good Morning, Vietnam." Then I went to the hospitality suite down the hall and dug into the free and well-stocked bar. Several hours more than several cost-free beverages later, I found myself sitting in a bar wondering why the five gentlemen to my left had stripped naked and were dancing around, waving to the other patrons in the bar and passers-by who were gawking through the open door...