Avivah Zornberg grew up in a world of rabbinic tradition and scholarship and received a Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge University. The Particulars of Rapture, the sequel to her award-winning study of the Book of Genesis, takes its title from a line by the American poet Wallace Stevens about the interdependence of opposite things, such as male and female, and conscious and unconscious. To her reading of the familiar story of the Israelites and their flight from slavery in Egypt, Avivah Zornberg has brought a vast range of classical Jewish interpretations and Midrashic sources, literary allusions, and ideas from philosophy and psychology. Her quest in this book, as she writes in the introduction, is "to find those who will hear with me a particular idiom of redemption," who will hear "within the particulars of rapture . . . what cannot be expressed." Zornberg's previous book, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, won the National Jewish Book Award for nonfiction in 1995 and has become a classic among readers of all religions. The Particulars of Rapture will enhance Zornberg's reputation as one of today's most original and compelling interpreters of the biblical and rabbinic traditions. From the Hardcover edition.
The Particulars of Rapture is Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's literary and theological exploration of the book of Exodus. Zornberg, the daughter of a rabbi, is a scholar of English literature who has become a popular teacher of religion in Israel, North America, and England. Her approach to Exodus is midrashic--a rabbinic tradition of creative, interpretive, even fanciful study of the Bible that often involves "the telling of stories that fill in gaps in the written biblical text." The Particulars of Rapture gathers many such stories that Zornberg has told and also discusses the process by which she created these stories--a process that she describes with reference to a wide range of psychological, philosophical, and literary works. If this all sounds complicated, that's because it is. "In my approach," she explains, "the biblical text is not allowed to stand alone, but has its boundaries blurred by later commentaries and by a persistent intertextuality that makes it impossible to imagine that meaning is somehow transparently present in the isolated text." She imagines interpretation to be part of the text itself, and not a second- order process that is derived from the text. It's a wise and receptive way of reading, and those willing to follow Zornberg's sometimes knotty prose will find, from time to time, clear bright observations about the way believers continue to experience Israel's slavery, freedom, and redemption even today. --Michael Joseph Gross
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Zornberg shows how to read the Bible as a concert of voices:
Some books seem too ponderous to read. They have so many pages that the book presses against one's stomach uncomfortably when one tries to read it while lying on the living room sofa. A reader may even be put off by a somewhat difficult sentence in the very first paragraph of the 582 pages, when the author offers a definition of "midrash": "My working definition - with all due caveats, acknowledging the essentially undefined nature of the term - would be this (etc)." What is a "working definition"? What are... more info
How Could I Have Missed This?:
Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb. "The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus", Image, 2002. How Could I Have Missed This? Amos Lassen I am a huge Zornberg fan but somehow I realized that I had never reviewed her second book, "The Particulars of Rapture" which I read almost daily when I was plodding through the Book of Exodus. Zornberg is such a profoundly creative Bible scholar that I must admit I sit in great awe of her and do not understand how it is that I never enrolled in one of her... more info
QUITE UNACCEPTABLE:
It was really quite sad to hear Avivah on NPR expound upon her approach to Biblical TRUTH. She praised the midrashic tradition as the best way to approach the biblical text wherein the text is used as a springboard to human exposition, thus making it relavant to today's world. This is typical of those who cannot accept the perfect WORD OF GOD because it steps on their delicate sensibilities, so they twist it to suit their own sinful desires. What we end up with is dross which is good for nothing. Of course... more info
A modern Midrash:
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is one of the most well-known and innovative Torah teachers of this generation. The present volume consists in her weekly commentaries (Parshat HaShavuah )on the second book of the Five Books of Moses, `Exodus.' Her aim is not to expound upon the surface (pshat) meaning of the text, but rather to provide a midrashic commentary. In this she looks for hidden narratives and meanings for alternative understandings as a way of deepening our understanding of the text. Here she brings to... more info
