✡ Sometime over the High Holy Days, Rabbi Scheinberg suggested to check out Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks‘ weekly podcast Covenant & Conversation. In general Rabbi Scheinberg’s reading suggestions are spot on and I had no doubt that a podcast referral would also we worthwhile. A simple synopsis of the references in this week’s commentary should suffice as a description – he ranges from Torah, through Talmud, Shakespeare, and much more. Relating them all to the singularly existential core of Jewish theology as expressed through the final chapters of Gensis.
We live life forwards, but we understand it backwards. The simplest example of this is an autobiography. Reading the story of a life, we see how a deprived childhood led to the woman of iron ambition, or the early loss of a parent shaped the man who spent his later years pursuing fame in search of the love he had lost. There is an air of inevitability about such stories, but it is an illusion. The deprived childhood or the loss of a parent might equally have led to a sense of defeat and inadequacy. What we become depends on our choices, and we are (almost) always free to choose this way or that. But what we become shapes the story of our life, and only in hindsight, looking back, do we see the past in context, as part of a tale whose end we now know. In life considered as a narrative, later events change the significance of earlier ones. It was the gift of Judaism to the world to discover time as a narrative.
Um, warp me back to college philosophy class and I am beginning to understand why it was so hard for a kid studied in Judaism to understand the influence of the Greek classics which lead to eventual and utter disregard of the convoluted fatalistic predestination of mental rapists like Calvin, Luther and even though no one wants to go there right now, the Mormons.
Without going to far off track, it is so wonderfully refreshing to listen to both Rabbi Scheinberg and Rabbi Sacks express the meaning of the Torah in such modernly salient terms while staying so wonderfully true to the texts. There is something almost 6000 years of history really gives you when compared to about 1500.