A thoughtful elucidation of a common practice of Judaism.
In this work of religious scholarship, Golden explores ways that biblical passages are paired in Jewish religious practice.
According to millennia of Jewish tradition, the weekly reading from the Torah is followed by the haftarah, or a recitation from Prophets. The origins of the haftarah, however, are not well understood, nor is it known how (or why) each haftarah was paired with its parsha, or its portion of the Torah. With a dearth of external evidence available, Golden turns to the texts themselves to try to untangle this ancient mystery and “identify what each haftarah recited on the Shabbos tells us about its parsha.” For example, Golden examines how the first six chapters of Genesis are informed by chapters 42 and 43 of Isaiah; the first discusses the Creation of the world and the story of Adam and Eve, while the second also references God’s Creation before moving on to what God will bring to Israel as punishment for faithlessness. In addition to the mirrored language of Creation, Golden draws a parallel between the faithlessness of Israel and that of Adam and Eve, who defied God’s instructions not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. By excavating the texts side by side, the author discovers new layers of meaning and new insights into the minds of the ancient teachers who helped to shape the Jewish religion. Golden’s prose is sharp, and, though often dry, it displays a contagious admiration for the ancient wisdom: “We see in connection with this parsha and haftarah a remarkable continuity of thought over hundreds of years and great distances,” he notes, writing on the books of Leviticus and Ezekiel. This is primarily a book for those interested in the Old Testament, and Jewish interpretations of it, specifically; however, Golden does not include the texts themselves, so interested readers should keep their Tanakh handy.
A thoughtful elucidation of a common practice of Judaism.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9781957579337
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Mosaica Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there’s nothing else one can do.
A memoir of living with the unbearable grief that followed the suicides of the author’s two teenage sons.
“I am in an abyss. I did not stray into the abyss. I did not fall into the abyss. I was not bullied or persecuted by others and thrown into the abyss. Rather, inexplicably and stunningly, I simply am in an abyss.” So writes Li, novelist and memoirist, whose two sons, full of promise, took their own lives—one, she ventures, for reasons of emotion, the other for reasons of thought, both concluding that a “livable life” was not possible. Li recounts her own struggles with depression, struggles not lightened by the delight of a Chinese media that considered her, having left her homeland and taken up writing in English, richly deserving of such punishment. Li lives through words and books, and here, even in the most harrowing moments, she reaches for them to explain herself to herself: here Ludwig Wittgenstein and Euripides, there Shakespeare and Philip Larkin, often Albert Camus. Always her habitat is that abyss, “which is my life,” marked by exhaustion, frustration, endless sorrow, and occasional bemusement, as when she notes that her older son died on the very day she put down a deposit for her new house in Princeton, the kind of coincidence that would seem unbelievable in fiction, on which she concludes, “Life…does not follow a novelist’s discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.” Though elegantly written and deeply thought through, Li’s book makes for emotionally difficult reading, offering little comfort for those who may be experiencing similar travails. “Both my children chose a hard thing,” she writes, encapsulating the narrative as a whole. “We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths.”
As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there’s nothing else one can do.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780374617318
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
