Review
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Title: Judaism: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Norman Solomon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Religious Studies
Year Published: Second edition, 2014
Number of Pages: 151
Binding: Perfectbound paper
ISBN13: 978-0-19-968735-0
Price: $11.95
Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
Who Put the Lamb in the Rama Lama Rambam?
Back during my brief teaching career I had a colleague who was ready to retire and move back to the south, Missouri or Kentucky, or maybe one then the other. She told me she was a Methodist and had written a novel with a Mormon character. Would I mind looking at a scene and see if a Mormon would act the way her character did in that circumstance? In one conversation I mentioned the Utah artist John Heber Lloyd, who put the first goldleafing on the Salt Lake Temple’s Angel Moroni.
John Heber was a wood grainer. His granddaughter, Bessie Lloyd Soderborg Clark, wrote that he “grained pine to oak, grew pine pillars to marble columns.”
She told me he worked on the mansions going up around town in the late 19th century, and being pulled down in the mid-twentieth. (I watched Conference in the Tabernacle last October, and there are still some benches there with his work, and the columns supporting the balcony.)
I told Chloe I thought *The Woodgrainer* would be a great title for a novel. She said she thought woodgraining was a perfect metaphor for Europeans coming into the Great Basin superimposing alpine valleys on desert, grazing the latter as if it were the former.
It seems like an apt metaphor for Christianity in general, superimposing Greek on an Aramaic life, and Greek thought on that life’s teachings, a New Testament on the Hebrew Testament, then taking the message to all the world when Christians had become super imposing.
So what would be a good image for Judaism? Abbreviation, compactness, acronym. Compacting the language, so the vowels drop out of writing, with jots pointing out where they should be; compacting the divine so we know the tetragrammaton but not quite how the name sounded or where or what the vowels were; abbreviating other names, so that looking up this Rashi Robert Alter delights in quoting, I find the name is an acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki, and Rabbi Moses Maimonides my co-worker so admires has his own acronym, the Rambam; which suggests that Norman Solomon’s choice to write a *Very Short Introduction to Judaism* is in keeping with compact cultural norms.
A very short introduction to thousands of years of history. Back in the late 1970s wandering around upstate New York my missionary companions and I began to notice bumper stickers with a cross on them proclaiming, “I Found It.” We thought of a few variations, like one with the Angel Moroni saying, “I Restored It,” or Joseph Smith, “I translated it.” But someone beat us to it: A Star of David, “We Never Lost It: In 5740 years.”
I was able to calculate the years that would have been on the bumper sticker in 1978 by subtracting 40 from Solomon’s calendar for 2018-9, year 5780 (page 67), which I suppose reflects optimism for a long sales life for this book, already in its second edition.
The section on the calendar reflects something else as well. I have often wondered how one would know it is midnight without a clock. There’s no reliable working moondial and many of us are asleep when the new day begins at midnight. But I hadn’t connected the problem of not being able to determine the hours on a cloudy night by looking at the position of the stars with the fact that the sabbath begins at sundown on the day before.
Solomon opens the book by stating that Judaism is based on nature, which implies the world we live in, not an ideal world based on Greek notions of unchanging circular perfection.
The imperfections of nature mean that the two cycles, lunar and solar, don’t jibe nicely. The lunar cycle is 29 1/4 days, which doesn’t divide evenly into the 364 3/4 days of the solar year. Solomon considers an Islamic response to this problem, which follows only a lunar year, a Christian approach with months of varying lengths which have no relation to the phases of the moon, and “the calendar adopted by the rabbis” from one known in Babylon and Greece (56), which has months of 28 or 29 days and years of 12 or 13 months, including 7 leap years of 13 months every 19 years. (Solomon includes a handy table of months on p. 57.)
Most of the book, though, doesn’t compare Judaism with other religions. Solomon opens the book by asking whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable. Ask a botanist and it’s a fruit. Ask a chef and it’s a vegetable. But how about asking the tomato how it sees itself, and not trying to define it by its relation to other produce?
So the comparisons in the book are mostly among different Jewish traditions, Reform, Orthodox, Restorationist, and Conservative. I kept thinking of the routine where Bob Newhart is talking on the phone, repeating back what the other person says, “Oh, Reform Jews aren’t real Jews?” The book is non-partisan, so Solomon doesn’t try to play the groups against each other, but in the last chapter he does consider four questions, abortion, euthanasia, artificial insemination, and surrogate motherhood, from these four points of view.
Solomon has chapters on “Making a Jewish Home,” “The Spiritual Life,” and “Why Did Judaism and Christianity Split?”, but the most entertaining is the catalog of people in Chapter 3 “How Did Judaism Develop?”, including the 13th century mystic who tried to convert the pope. You would think he’d be a folk hero, but Abraham Abulafia’s excesses alienated a lot of people and he was “all but forgotten” till scholars in the late 20th century “piece[d] together his philosophy from unpublished manuscripts strewn through the libraries of Europe” (46).
The catalog includes Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra, both oft-quoted by Robert Alter. I particularly like Rashi’s midrash on Genesis 22:2:
_Your son_. He said to Him, ‘I have two sons.’ He said to him, _Your only one_. He said, ‘This one is an only one to his mother and this one is an only one to his mother.’ He said to him,_Whom you love._ He said to Him, ‘I love both of them.’ He said to him, ‘_Isaac_’ (108).
Solomon doesn’t profile Rabbi David Kimhi whose pungent comment on Genesis 42:37 Robert Alter quotes. It’s that unsettling moment where Reuben has offered to let Jacob slaughter his children if he doesn’t bring Benjamin back safely from Egypt:
“[Jacob] said: ‘Stupid firstborn! Are they your sons and not my sons?'”
I didn’t know who or when Kimhi was until Harold Bloom quoted him in *Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.* And when I searched Duckduckgo for more information I found he has his own acronym: The RaDak. (Maybe it’s time for me to get one: The HaSoC–does that make me a priestly writer? No, that’s cassock. The hassock is what the becassocked priest kneels on. Oh well.)
Jesus and Yahweh could be subtitled “A Very Short Introduction to Kaballah,” but “The Names Divine” isn’t so much a subtitle, or an appositive, as a declarative sentence, and Bloom spends a lot of time contemplating what the names divine, and how.
If Solomon isn’t interested in how Jews and Christians define themselves as against each other, Bloom is very interested in how Jesus and Yahweh relate to each other, and how Jesus suffers the anxiety of Yahweh’s influence.
Bloom says the book is a kind of culmination of what he began in *The Anxiety of Influence,* and I avoided his work for a long time because of that book’s vision of entropy. When I react against the previous generation I can never reach their heights, nor can the next reach mine (not much of a reach, admittedly), nor the next theirs, so the big bang reduces to a tinny whimper. But Bloom’s exuberance makes me disbelieve that we read with anxiety.
Instead of reading Bloom as a competitor I’ll never be able to surpass I see him as a kindred spirit, just as I saw Virginia Woolf as a kindred spirit not to be afraid of when I finally read *A Room of One’s Own,* someone who joys in language and glories in words.
Bloom makes several glancing (and witty) references to Mormons, but what sticks with me most is not the comments about Adam-God, or how Mormons don’t try to jump through all the intellectual hoops of showing how three Gods are really one, being instead cheerful polytheists, but his distinctions between a theological Jesus, a theological Yahweh, and the Jesus and Yahweh we meet in the scriptures.
The Jesus and Yahweh we meet are not theological Gods, they are people. Bloom repeatedly calls theology the invention of Philo of Alexandria, (c. 25 BCE – c. 50 CE) an invention meant to depersonalize God.
The idea of God as a person resonates nicely with Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo teachings, and the idea that God was deliberately depersonalized resonates with teachings about the loss of ancient truths, the cycles of falling away and restoration, but I found a wondrous resonance in Bloom’s discussion of kaballist Isaac Luriah’s idea of zimzum (1534–1572).
Zimzum has a lot of meanings, including inhaling/exhaling and inspiration/expiration, meaning that if Yahweh inspires breath into us, part of his breath expires–as we expand Yahweh contracts, goes into exile, confinement, rather than filling the vast expanse of the universe. Think of this in Book of Mormon terms with Yahweh and Humans as complementary opposites, the opposition in all things that holds the universe together.
Bloom and Solomon are also complementary opposites. Describing a Judaism tied to the earth and natural cycles, Solomon doesn’t mention the gulf Christians see between God and humans, a gulf so wide that God is wholly/holy other than us. Bloom does explore the abyss between us and our creator, but the book is hardly abysmal.
Read the book for its playfulness and joy, and for the haunting paragraph where the man who has repeatedly said he doesn’t trust in the covenant describes himself getting up at nights, sleepless, taking comfort in Torah, Kaballah, and “vast swaths” of the Babylonian Talmud.
“In my old age I have taken to reading the scriptures,” Hugh Nibley said, and if you want a sense of how Jews read and study scripture, Robalt’s “The Five Books of Moses” is delightful not only for its quotations of Rashi and Ibn Ezra, but for his desire to read the text whole, not as a collection of fragments, and for the times he says things like, “Nobody really knows what this phrase means.”
The Robalt glosses obscure passages and words that only appear once or twice, and it occurs to me that maybe “the great and marvelous things yet to be revealed about the kingdom of God” may include the meanings of obscure words and difficult passages.
For a more detailed (compact, smaller print) example of Jewish reading and thinking about scripture, *The Jewish Annotated New Testament* is a fine example. I particularly like Daniel Boyarin’s essay, “Logos, a Jewish Word: John’s Prologue as Midrash,” which reclaims John’s prologue from those who want to assign or consign it to Greek gnostics.
The commentaries includes thousands of references to Tanakh, Talmud, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other ancient sources, and gives a very good sense of just how Jewish the early Christians (Greek word) were. The scholars writing the commentaries also give a lot to think about for someone like myself interested in the disastrous split that occurred as Messianic Jews became infused with believing gentiles, who eventually pulled the movement away from its Jewish roots.
And finally, around 1983 I read an article in BYU Today by Dennis Packard called “Growing Up: From Peter Rabbit to Rabbi Goldman.” It talked about how James E. Faulconer learned to study scripture in graduate school when he asked Rabbi Goldman if they could study Genesis together that semester, and the rabbi answered, “How about the first chapter?” (or was it verse?).
I happened to be on campus one day and went looking for it in the periodicals section, but issues from that far back were being moved to Special Collections, so it was a year before I could spend a few happy hours browsing and getting reacquainted with old issues. Then about the end of last year I came upon the story again in Faulconer’s *Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions.* Faulconer begins with that story, then proceeds to teach us how Rabbi Goldman taught him to read and ask questions and study it out in his mind and on paper. I’m still reading the book, so I can’t give it a full review, just a very short introduction.
When you add the vowel points and expand the acronyms and unpack the compact between God and us, Judaism blossoms into a rich tree of life and light to the world. Thanks for the gift.
Other works referenced:
Title: Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Riverhead Books: A Division of Penguin
Genre: Literary Criticism / Scripture Studies
Year Published: 2005
Number of Pages: 238
Binding: Hardbound
ISBN10: 1-57322-322-0
Price: $24.95
Title: The Five Books of Moses
Author: Translation and Commentary by Robert Alter
Publisher: WW Norton
Genre: Scripture
Year Published: 2004
Number of Pages: 1064
Binding: Hardbound
ISBN13: 9-780393-019551
Price:
Title: The Jewish Annotated New Testament
Author: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors
Publisher: Oxford Unversity Press
Genre: Scripture
Year Published: 2010
Number of Pages: 637
Binding: Hardbound
ISBN13: 978-0-19-529770-6
Price: $35
Title: Scripture Study
Author: James E. Faulconer
Publisher: http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/book/scripture-study-tools-and-suggestions/
Genre: Scripture Study
Year Published: 1999