Significant Jewish Books

by Bonny V. Fetterman

Our Significant Jewish Books column, inspired by UAHC President Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie's Reform Movement Literacy Initiative, challenges all Reform Jews to read at least four books of Jewish substance a year. In each issue we are recommending two titles representing the best of Jewish literature, both fiction and nonfiction, selected in cooperation with the UAHC Department of Adult Jewish Growth.

It is our hope that you will read at least one of these selections on your own or with others in a synagogue study or book group. Connect with thousands of other Significant Jewish Books readers by accessing the Significant Jewish Books website, where you'll find a discussion guide and more.

The Red Tent
Anita Diamant

Midrashim, interpretive teachings often written in the form of legends, fill in gaps or expand on the biblical narrative. As the most terse and abbreviated biblical stories are often about women, many contemporary women writers have turned to the art of midrash-making to cast new light on figures such as Lilith (Adam's first wife and the one created as his equal), Serah bat Asher (a descendant of Jacob who leads Moses to Joseph's coffin prior to the Exodus), Miriam (a prophetess in her own right), and now Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah.

In The Red Tent, Anita Diamant, author of several popular guides to Jewish living (Choosing a Jewish Life, The New Jewish Wedding Book, Saying Kaddish), has transformed Dinah's story into a full-length novel. "I did not set out to explain or rewrite the biblical text," says Diamant, "but to use Dinah's silence to try to imagine what life was like for women in this historical period."

This act of midrash-making, says Professor Howard Schwartz of the University of Missouri, is "a continuing process of the reintegration of the past into the present. Each time this takes place, the tradition is transformed and must be reimagined. And it is this very process that keeps the tradition vital and perpetuates it."

To understand Diamant's creative use of midrash, it is best to begin with the biblical narrative itself: Shortly after Jacob's reunion with Esau, Jacob settles his household in the town of Shechem. There, his daughter Dinah meets the son of Hamor, the prince of the land. The Bible tells us: "He took her and lay with her, forcing her" (Genesis 34:2). This sounds like a rape, but the narrative continues: "His emotions clung to Dinah, Jacob's daughter. He loved the girl and he spoke to the heart of the girl" (Genesis 34:3). How does Dinah feel about these events? The Bible does not say.

In Genesis 34, all the attention focuses on the actions of the men around Dinah. Eager to set things right and make an alliance with Jacob's tribe, Shechem and his father visit Jacob and offer an elaborate brideprice for Dinah. Jacob and his sons make another demand before they will agree to marriages between the children of Israel and Shechem: that all the men of Shechem, including the prince and his son, be circumcised, in accordance with God's command to Abraham: "This is my covenant which you are to keep, between Me and you and your seed after you: every male among you shall be circumcised" (Genesis 17:10). The lovestruck son consents, and the entire male community performs the ritual. But Jacob's sons, Simeon and Levi, renege on Jacob's word to give his daughter in marriage if the men of Shechem enter the covenant through circumcision; instead, they slaughter the men of Shechem in their weakened state, including Dinah's lover. On his deathbed, Jacob curses his sons for their treachery (Genesis 49:5-7). Dinah is never mentioned again.

Writing Dinah's story from Dinah's point of view, Diamant explores the relationships of mothers, sisters, and daughters, who teach each other the mysteries of women's lives in the "red tent," where women retreat at times of menstruation and childbirth. As Jacob's only daughter, Dinah listens to the stories of her mother Leah and the other mothers of Jacob's children -- Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah. In Dinah's voice, Diamant gives an original interpretation of how Leah came to replace Rachel under the chupah with Jacob. Dinah's own sensuality blossoms in her impetuous love affair with the young prince of Shechem. After her brothers' violence against the men of Shechem, she leaves with the mother of her slain lover for Egypt, where she bears Shechem's child and begins a career as a trusted midwife. Preceding her brothers' sojourn in Egypt, she builds a new life in a strange land, as does her favorite brother Joseph, with whom she is eventually reunited. Unlike the biblical narrative, which depicts her solely as a victim and a pawn, Diamant's midrash portrays Dinah as a woman with a will of her own.

Excerpt

We have been lost to each other for so long.

My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust.

This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. That is why I became a footnote, my story a brief detour between the well-known history of my father, Jacob, and the celebrated chronicle of Joseph, my brother. On those rare occasions when I was remembered, it was as a victim. Near the beginning of your holy book, there is a passage that seems to say I was raped and continues with the bloody tale of how my honor was avenged.

It's a wonder that any mother ever called a daughter Dinah again. But some did. Maybe you guessed that there was more to me than the voiceless cipher in the text. Maybe you heard it in the music of my name: the first vowel high and clear, as when a mother calls to her child at dusk; the second sound soft, for whispering secrets on pillows. Dee-nah.

No one recalled my skill as a midwife, or the songs I sang, or the bread I baked for my insatiable brothers. Nothing remained except a few mangled details about those weeks in Shechem.

There was far more to tell. Had I been asked to speak of it, I would have begun with the story of the generation that raised me, which is the only place to begin. If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life -- without flinching or whining -- the stronger the daughter.

From The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (Picador USA 1997). Reprinted by arrangement with Picador USA, a division of St. Martin's Press.

JEWS: The Essence and Character of a People
Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheimer

In their landmark work, Arthur Hertzberg, the eminent historian and world Jewish leader, and Aron Hirt-Manheimer, longtime editor of Reform Judaism magazine, explore the very essence of Jewish existence.

The Jews are a peculiar people, they write. In age after age they have been expected to disappear, and yet they persist. What accounts for this incredible continuity? Jews who choose to remain Jewish do so out of choice -- and a sense of chosenness, the authors argue. Even "generations of modern nonbelieving Jews have adhered to their Jewishness for reasons they themselves cannot articulate... [They] sometimes have trouble producing a coherent rationale for clinging to their Jewishness, but they feel compelled and even possessed to do so." In some mysterious way, they feel commanded. Moreover, they see themselves as links in a chain of ancestors who comprise "the saving remnant" -- those who have elected to carry on their Jewish otherness and continue the journey.

JEWS is both a unique and courageous book. It is courageous because trying to define the essence of a people's character can leave the authors open to charges of reductionism; moreover, Jews are extremely wary of stereotyping, which has so often been used against them collectively and individually. Yet, in JEWS, a portrait of an "essence" emerges that does ring true. From our idol-smashing ancestor Abraham onward, we see a continuous thread in the Jewish people's willingness to be different, to stand apart, to break into querulous factions, to stand up for our right to be ourselves. JEWS presents a lively journey of the Jewish people through history, focusing especially on the responses of Jews to their Jewishness in various times and places and taking a close look at famous personalities who must decide whether to affirm this identity or discard it under intense pressure of the majority culture. As early as the third century BCE, the Greco-Egyptian priest Manetho assails the Jews for being different and aloof; the story continues with the destruction of the Second Temple and the Bar Kochba revolt, and traces the reasons for the demonization of Jews in the emerging Church of Rome. The terrible choice Jews must make at the time of the expulsion from Spain is depicted, as are acts of heroism, such as Do -- a Gracia Nasi's struggle to stop Pope Paul IV from exporting the Inquisition to the Italian city of Ancona by organizing a Jewish economic boycott of the city.

Particularly incisive are the chapters dealing with the challenges of modernity as exemplified in famous Jewish personalities: Baruch Spinoza, who proposed the possibility of secular humanistic society; Karl Marx and Theodor Herzl, who sought radical solutions to end Jewish otherness; Heinrich Heine and Franz Kafka, who struggled with alienation from both the majority culture and Jewish life; and Woody Allen, whose Jewish ambivalence runs through his art. From Ahad Ha'am to Mordecai Kaplan, the authors of this essentially optimistic book discuss the attempts of twentieth-century thinkers to give Judaism a modern cast, the vexing questions raised by the Holocaust, the current tensions dividing Jewish factions, and the quest to revive Jewish learning and faith in all quarters.

Excerpt

Throughout the centuries many Jews have tried to free themselves from the curse of anti-Semitism by leaving the Jewish community. Often, those who shifted their allegiance have done so reluctantly, in pain and self-reproach, saying that they have made the sacrifice to ensure the safety of their children. Century after century, a saving remnant of the Jews have made the opposite decision. They have brought children into the world and passed on memories of expulsions, murderous persecutions, and pogroms -- the very memories that drove the others out of the fold. Why? The simplest explanation is, of course, defiance. Bringing children into the world and rearing them to be Jews is the assertion that "they can't do this to us" -- whoever the "they" may be and whatever "they" may be doing.

But angry defiance alone does not account for the persistence of the Jews. Nor do they endure as a people in order to make an often unwilling world better. Jews choose to raise children to be Jews because we will not break the link with past generations of our kind. We will not deprive our children of their collective past.

We know, of course, that Jews will have to fight the risky battle to improve the world. God seems to give us no choice, but that is not why Jews remain within the fold. By choice, we are ancestor worshipers. The American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that each person is a charabanc (that is, a public conveyance) on whom all his ancestors ride. That is a valid description of the essential and irreducible affirmation of the committed Jew. That is why the Talmud says that at the moment of God's revelation at Sinai, the souls of all Jews, the six hundred thousand witnesses and those yet unborn, were present together. Jews may argue with God and scream at one another with factional passion, but what keeps them together as a people is the conviction that they are the descendants of great ancestors. They want their children to continue the line.