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The beating heart of all religious enterprise undertaken in the spiritof intellectual integrity is a riddle: how can a God who exists beyondthe ken of human beings—and outside of the spatial and temporalcoordinates that are the most basic of all factors that we bring to bearin our perception and evaluation of the world—how can such a Godbe known at all, let alone worshiped meaningfully?Classical Jewish sources approach the matter in different ways.The Bible, for example, takes a two-pronged approach, describingin some passages a God whom none can survive the experience ofseeing directly (Exodus 33:20) and with whom too close contact canphysically disfigure (Exodus 34:29), maim (Genesis 3...
The storytellers represented in Chosen Tales are among the most active and talented Jewish storytellers in the world. This extraordinary collection of 68 stories is, in a way, a Jewish storytelling festival, where storytellers gather to share stories, hear each other's stories, and get to know each other better through the stories that are told. Come and experience the magic of the oral tradition. Read and retell these stories again and again so that you too can shape the destiny of the timeless tradition of Jewish storytelling.
To reference death as sleep is commonplace. Indeed, so usual is the use of the terminology of rest, repose, and slumber to denote the process of dying and, indeed, death itself, that such linguistic turns barely call attention to themselves at all: to wish aloud that a deceased individual rest in peace could hardly be more ordinary a prayer even for moderns little given to lyrical expression or to the use of metaphor in daily speech. But to approach the equation from the other direction—and so to assert that, no less than death is sleep, sleep is death, or at least death dialed down sufficiently to deprive it of its permanence and awful finality—is less common a thing to say...and it is even less common than that actually to believe. Indeed, although the Talmud, speaking with strange precision, asserted long centuries ago that sleep is precisely one-sixtieth of death, it is hard to find moderns who comfortably or naturally think of awakening from a night’s sleep as a kind of daily resurrection.1 Consider, for example, the undeservedly obscure prayer of Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English polymath, who movingly wrote:
In its famous opening chapter, the Hebrew Bible describes creation as consisting of twin acts of making and separating: God creates light on the first day and then separates it from the darkness, just as on the next day God creates the firmament and then sets it in place to separate the waters above from the waters below. And so it follows, at least in theory, that when human beings seek to create through the medium of their own artistry, creativity, or industry—and are obviously unable to mimic the uniquely divine act of creation ex nihilo—they seek to do so through the one part of the process they can imitate: separation. Indeed, the famous quip that the correct way to make a statue of a horse is to take a huge block of marble and then to chip away the parts that don’t look like a horse is just an amusing way of suggesting the same idea: namely, that the human creative process involves the perception of something embedded within something else and then the subsequent liberation of that thing from its former setting so that it may exist on its own and in its own right.
The Torah has two basic components: a long, complex narrative thatserves as the backstory to the covenant and its literary frame, and thespecific commandments that serve as the terms of that covenant. Thenarrative itself—the long, complex narratives relating to the creationof the world, the great flood, the adventures of the patriarchs andmatriarchs of Israel, the descent into slavery in Egypt, the exodusfrom Egypt, the events at Mount Sinai, and the subsequent journeythe edge of the Land of Israel, where the people are camped whenthe Torah narrative concludes with Moses’ death—is relativelywell-known even in the secular Western world. And some of thecommandments too are well known to ...
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