Catholic Library World reviews Cheryl Berman’s Reasonable Doubts

Reasonable Doubts: A Religious Skeptic Learns a Thing or Two About God
By Cheryl Berman, Urim Publications, 2010, 158 pp., ISBN 978-965-524-039-9, $19.95

by Sanford R. Silverburg

It is well recognized in Judaism that God is the Creator of all – to include evil and tragedy. But for many, the mystery of how good and evil can coexist and simultaneously be the creation of the same deity is cause of skepticism that this kind of spiritual being can exist at all. Cheryl Berman is an American Jew, trained as a philosopher who presently lives, writes, and teaches in Israel; her specialty is medieval Jewish philosophy. She presents here a personal, cognitive journey between two worlds: Elihu in the Babylonian diaspora, who questions God’s reasoning for denying a Jewish presence in Jerusalem; and another, found in the Book of Job, in which philosophy is based on thought, while science rests on what is known. She then weaves her examination beginning with a discussion of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, then offering contributions from prominent medieval Jewish thinkers such as Saadya, who sought innate perfection of perfect justice; Maimonides, who examined the human causes of suffering and advanced an intellectual immunity to it; and Gersonides’ theory of Divine providence. The author brings to bear the Jewish ethical tradition of faith based not on knowledge, but on oneself and recognition of one’s relationship to God, for faith must be concretized by deeds.

A lightly treated philosophical tract that deals with the complexity of human existence in an attempt to strengthen one’s ultimate understanding of their relationship to God.

Best suited for an introductory study in comparative religious thought.

The story of how Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin was rejected in 1948 has emerged in a letter found in Jerusalem

by Dalya Alberge

A novel that became a worldwide publishing phenomenon more than 60 years after it was first published in Germany was turned down by a British publisher in 1948, according to a rejection letter found in Jerusalem.

British readers had to wait until 2009 for the first translation of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, a masterpiece about extreme fear under a dictatorship. It came out in Germany in 1947, weeks after the author’s death at 53, following a life blighted by mental illness and morphine.

Penguin has sold more than 300,000 paperback copies of the book in 13 months, a sensational figure for foreign literature. In the US, where it appears under the title Every Man Dies Alone, sales have topped 200,000, while the book has been translated into 20 different languages. A major German feature film is also in the pipeline.

However, Putnam & Company, bought by Penguin in 1996, failed to see its potential, even though it had published Fallada’s books in the 1930s.

Writing to a friend of Fallada – real name Rudolf Ditzen – who had submitted a specimen translation, a Putnam publishing director wrote: “I have the distinct impression that our poor author, after all his tribulations, had lost his inspiration. This is not to be wondered at, and it might have come back if he had only lived. Now we must regard this as one more of the countless war tragedies.”

The letter, sent to an Austrian Jewish writer called Carl Ehrenstein, has come to light among unpublished papers deposited at the National Library in Jerusalem a few years ago.

The file went unnoticed until now because Fallada’s name was unknown in Israel. The book has since become the number one bestseller there – selling 100,000 copies.

A newly appointed archivist noticed Fallada’s name on an uncatalogued file. Dr Stefan Litt said he would never had given it a second glance two years ago because the author was unpublished in Israel, “but it was amazing to see in the light of [Alone in Berlin] becoming a world bestseller”.

Professor Haggai Ben-Shammai, the National Library’s academic director, suggested that the British public in 1948 might not have been ready for a German novel so soon after the war. “They were probably suspicious of the possibility that there are good Germans [or those] who really suffered,” he said.

Alone in Berlin has become Penguin’s bestselling classic, beating George Orwell, Jane Austen and Dickens.

On seeing the letter yesterday, Dennis Loy Johnson, the founder of Melville House Publishing, offered another explanation for his rejection in 1948 – that Fallada ended up in East Germany and Putnam may have assumed he was a Communist. But he added that the rejection letter “simply confirms my theory of the profound lack of editorial acumen” on the part of the world’s major publishers. He said that George Putnam, the owner of the company that bore his name, had sent his own yacht in 1938 to urge Fallada to flee Germany. “It feels like a cold betrayal, doesn’t it?” he said.

From The Observer. Original article can be found here.

Innovation in Jewish Law review

by Pinchas Roth

Many battles have been fought over the question of how Jewish law changes, if at all. The issues are usually fraught and the discussion is highly emotional and explosive. Publicists and historians use them as grist for their mills, but the legal scholar is left frustrated by the lack of dispassionate thought about the underlying issues. Michael Broyde, a professor of law and also an important Halakhic decisor, chose an innocuous aspect of Jewish law, and used it as a case study to investigate the general question of how innovation occurs in halakhah. His analysis focuses on Havinenu, an abridged version of the daily prayer described in the Mishnah and the Talmud. Today, this prayer is virtually unknown and almost universally unused, and Broyde asks why that is. Discussing this example allows him to demonstrate his general claim, that halakhah changes over time through the intensive process of learning, interpretation and re-interpretation. New interpretation – chiddush – is the vehicle for organic change.

This slim volume follows the history of interpretation of the talmudic sources methodically and carefully. It provides a rare opportunity to watch the thought process of a halakhist as he progresses from the primary sources, navigating the various and conflicting interpretations by medieval and early modern commentators, to practical conclusions about the present day. Most of the book consists of textual analysis of sources presented in Hebrew and in English translation, and the author makes an effort to explain these sources in an accessible way. Not light reading, but an opportunity for readers without a very strong background in Jewish law to study a topic in depth.

The original article may be found here in the AJL Newsletter.

If We Could Hear Them Now: Encounters with Jewish Heroines of the Past

by Jennifer Breger, JOFA Journal

Many recent novels have focused on the lives of women of the Jewish past, including female biblical figures. In this volume, Alice Becker Lehrer, who teaches at the David Weissman Institute of Montreal’s Bronfman Jewish Education Center, “conducts interviews” with a range of women from Tanakh and Jewish history. The author’s focus is to show how the stories can serve to inspire us today. Her fictionalized interviews allow each woman to, as it were, “relate her own story from an individual standpoint.” The “subjects” span biblical figures including Tamar and Tzipporah, women from the rabbinic period such as Rachel, wife to Rabbi Akiva, and women from later centuries such as Rashi’s daughters and Henrietta Szold. Each imaginary interview is preceded by a short introduction that puts the interviewee in textual and historical context. The biblical interviews skillfully draw upon traditional commentaries and midrashic texts to bring the chosen subjects to life.

From The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA)

The original article may be found in the Fall 2010 Journal here.

Dead Sea scrolls to go on Google archive

by Jennifer Lipman

The Dead Sea scrolls will soon be available to anyone with an internet connection.

Search engine Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority have revealed plans for an online archive of the scrolls, which number around 900.

The images will appear in high definition, with a special camera costing more than £157,000 used to photograph the scrolls. The organisers hope that the website will be live by the beginning of 2011.

Review: Reasonable Doubts

Reasonable Doubts

by Israel Drazin

Philosophy student Cheryl Berman, an Orthodox Jew, who now teaches philosophy in Israel, is drawn to the teachings of the medieval rationalistic philosophers, who stress the use of intelligence, until the day that she is hit by a car while walking to school. He leg was badly mangled; she suffers brain damage and amnesia for awhile, and is unable to read. As she recovers – her mind completely and her leg scarred for life – she finds that the rationalistic approach to life no longer answers her questions or gives her satisfaction. “Why,” she asked, “did God do this to me?”

Russia – Jewish Books

A U.S. federal judge has ordered Russia to surrender thousands of Jewish books and manuscripts seized during conflicts in the first half of the 20th century.

The New York-based Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch sued Russia to get the papers back.

In a decision released Wednesday in Washington, a federal judge ruled that the seizure of the documents served no public purpose, and that the Jewish group was not compensated when they were taken.

The judge also noted that the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin promised former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that the materials would be returned.

Soviet authorities seized the books and papers during the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War between 1917 and 1925. The materials wound up in Poland and were stolen by the Nazis in World War Two. The Soviets retrieved them after the war and placed them in the Russian State Military Archives.

From The Voice of America

The original article may be found here.

Israel National News Reviews Nehama Leibowitz, Teacher and Bible Scholar

Nehama Leibowitz, Teacher and Bible Scholar

Review of Nehama Leibowitz, Teacher and Bible Scholar

by Chaim Seymour

In 1930, the newly-married Nehama Leibowitz left Germany and emigrated to what was then Palestine. There she taught Bible in a variety of different frameworks including university, radio, school, and her own one-woman large-scale correspondence course entitled “Gilyonot.” She unobtrusively played her part in a number of revolutions. Through her work, the Bible became important and relevant. For many Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox institutions, she was the first woman teacher. She was the recipient of the Israel Prize for Education in 1956.

Two weeks ago, I was at the Herzog Teacher Training College in Alon Shvut. Every summer they have a four-day “happening.” Each day some 1,500 people come to hear lectures about the Bible. Since most people do not come for four full days, we are probably talking about 3,000 people who are willing to travel to a remote spot and sit down voluntarily to listen to lectures on the Bible. This successful institution certainly owes something to Nehama.