Mother Mary's Page

We’ve been hearing stories from the Torah all summer long, focusing on the family of Abraham.  It’s what C.S. Lewis once called “a cracking good story.”  There are some excellent books that have given me a greater appreciation for this saga.  All are written by Jews, for whom Torah is the central biblical document.  All are written for the general public, and, while they make reference to the Hebrew text, they treat their readers as intelligent and engaged human beings, not as scholars of some esoteric discipline.

Robert Alter.   Genesis: Translation and Commentary. (1997).  Alter is a Jew with an excellent command of Hebrew and a professor of literature at California Berkeley.  His careful attention to every detail of a narrative results in a  far deeper appreciation of the biblical literature. If you find his approach fascinating, you may want to read his Art of Biblical Narrative (1983).

Another brilliant Jewish commentator who is also a psychoanalyst is Naomi Rosenblatt.

She wrote Wrestling with Angels: What Genesis teaches us about our Spiritual Identity, Sexuality, and Personal Relationships (1996) from notes from an interdisciplinary, ecumenical Bible study that she conducted for several years.

Both Rosenblatt and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg make liberal use of the reflections on these texts collected over the centuries, called the Talmud.  Zornberg’s book about Genesis is called The Beginning of Desire (1996), and her skills as a psychoanalyst combine with her facility with the Hebrew texts and centuries of commentary to give us a fresh perspective on the narratives.  Zornberg organizes her texts in chapters that correspond to the classical Jewish lectionary.  If you want to get a sense of what Zornberg is about, you may wish to listen to her conversation with Krista Tippett, who hosts the radio show, Speaking of Faith, archived at speakingoffaith.publicradio.org.

Longer than these books and with a political agenda is Leon Kass’s The Beginning of Wisdom:Reading Genesis (2003).  Kass is a physician, a bioethecist, and a professor of Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He was raised in a secular Jewish home, and he first took a serious look at these texts as a professor of an interdisciplinary core course.  His work with the text gives him a profound appreciation for the cohesiveness of this text as Jews and Christians have received it. 

All these books are available on Amazon.  All will reward a reading with a deepening appreciation of the power of this ancient text to live and yield insights that well may result in your growing closer to God.  Happy reading!

Grace and peace to you and yours,

Mary