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Writing With Scripture
| Article
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19881 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1992 |
2,256 Words |
| Author
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Jacob Neusner
Jacob Neusner is University Professor at Brown University and
author of Death and Birth of Judaism and other books. |
GOD WAS IN THIS PLACE AND I, I DID NOT KNOW
Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning
Lawrence Kushner
Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1991
192 pp., $21.95
Rabbi Lawrence Kushener's sustained essay on theological themes takes its title from Gen.28:16, which reports what Jacob said when he woke up after dreaming of the ladder that joins heaven and earth: "Surely God was in this place and I did not know." In a sustained meditation on the many sides of that statement, Kushner introduces the reader to the commentaries of seven spiritual teachers of the third to the nineteenth centuries in order to work out a theological program of fundamental interest. According to Kushner, the resulting collection is actually one long midrash, that is fiction concealed beneath the apparent text of the biblical narrative. So what he does here is write with Scripture, precisely as did the founders and sages of Judaism in the formative age, from the first tot he seventh centuries. A.D.
Here is a work in which, using entirely contemporary language and terms, an interesting and thoughtful rabbi proposes to take up the modes of thought of the canon of Judaism and pursue his own program within its discipline. It is as though, on the eve of the twenty-first century, someone undertook to write a new gospel.
The author of that new gospel would set forth the story of Jesus Christ, not claiming it spoke of how things really were in the first century (few outside of academic circles really care anyhow), but attempting to formulate a gospel such as Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John might have written had they lived in our time and place and thought about our problems, using the contemporary idiom of thought and reflection. In that context, people will appreciate what Kushner has tried to accomplish: a work of considerable ambition.
For Judaism, the received Scriptures--which Christianity knows as "the Old Testament," and Judaism as "the written Torah"--form the arena where religious expression takes place. Thinkers within Judaism find a place in the ancient, rich tradition of faith by working with the sayings and stories of the Torah.
In this enchanting meditation on Jacob's statement, "Surely God was in this place and I did not know" (Gen.28:16),
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