Overview

"Winner of the 2021 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. The Jewish tradition has held and healed the Jewish people for centuries. As we live through ""unprecedented"" times, there is wisdom in locating ourselves in precedent, in stories of plague-biblical, contemporary, and in between-in an effort to meaningfully find our way through. Torah in a Time of Plague is meant to provide guidance and offer provocations for the conversations we need to orient ourselves anew. This collection brings together academic and rabbinic voices from within the Covid-19 epidemic to wrestle in real time with its resonances and implications. Drawing on theology, philosophy, literature, history, liturgy, and legal theory, essays both rigorous and raw explore the many layers of this tumultuous period. Torah in a Time of Plague thus reflects on and contributes to Torah in our time."

Full Product Details

9781953829092

Table of Contents

Reviews

When we Jews suffer, we seek wisdom from our tradition; and the perverse paradox that has sustained our tradition for a long time is that periods of loss and fear - as Dr. Erin Leib Smokler so eloquently chronicles in her opening to this powerful volume - are also fecund moments for theological and intellectual creativity. We respond to crisis with the generative work of memory, mining our past and our present for the wisdom to face an uncertain future. This book is full of gems, in the form of Torah, philosophy, social criticism, poetry and prayer; it is to be kept close by not just to understand the horrors of the Covid-19 pandemic, and not just for the spiritual guidance we need to survive it, but also to inspire us to write the Torah we will need when we face the next crisis. -Yehuda Kurtzer, president, The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America Erin Leib Smokler has achieved something remarkable with this volume. Moving swiftly to gather an extraordinary collection of voices while still in the throes of the pandemic, she has created a much-needed space for reflection that is strikingly un-rushed, subtle, serious, and spacious. The essays in this collection - theologically modest, intellectually rigorous, historically grounded, and emotionally honest - will be deeply nourishing to anyone seeking language that bravely stands between speechlessness and spin, and slowly, tenderly, searchingly begins to offer us a way forward through the still unfolding losses of this time. -Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, president, Hebrew College If the hallmarks of this difficult time have been loss and isolation, then TORAH IN A TIME OF PLAGUE offers a modicum of consolation and repair with the multifarious voices that it convenes. By turns scholarly and lyrical, contemplative and bracing, this volume invites readers into a tender community of thought and feeling, helping us to make sense of the year we have just experienced in Jewish terms. Appealing to theology, history, and literary reflection, these essays locate our plague year in the long Jewish arcs of grief and devastation, as well as consolation and hope. -Dr. Miriam Udel, editor and translator, Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature; associate professor of Yiddish, Emory University A dazzling array of scholars, rabbis, and writers explores diverse facets of the theological vertigo that comes from confrontation with the fragility of life. The result is an engaging volume full of learning and also of wisdom, a book that helps us both to think about precarity and pandemic, and also to live in the midst of it. -Dr. David Nirenberg, dean of the Divinity School, University of Chicago, author, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

"""When we Jews suffer, we seek wisdom from our tradition; and the perverse paradox that has sustained our tradition for a long time is that periods of loss and fear - as Dr. Erin Leib Smokler so eloquently chronicles in her opening to this powerful volume - are also fecund moments for theological and intellectual creativity. We respond to crisis with the generative work of memory, mining our past and our present for the wisdom to face an uncertain future. This book is full of gems, in the form of Torah, philosophy, social criticism, poetry and prayer; it is to be kept close by not just to understand the horrors of the Covid-19 pandemic, and not just for the spiritual guidance we need to survive it, but also to inspire us to write the Torah we will need when we face the next crisis."" -Yehuda Kurtzer, president, The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America ""Erin Leib Smokler has achieved something remarkable with this volume. Moving swiftly to gather an extraordinary collection of voices while still in the throes of the pandemic, she has created a much-needed space for reflection that is strikingly un-rushed, subtle, serious, and spacious. The essays in this collection - theologically modest, intellectually rigorous, historically grounded, and emotionally honest - will be deeply nourishing to anyone seeking language that bravely stands between speechlessness and spin, and slowly, tenderly, searchingly begins to offer us a way forward through the still unfolding losses of this time."" -Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, president, Hebrew College ""If the hallmarks of this difficult time have been loss and isolation, then TORAH IN A TIME OF PLAGUE offers a modicum of consolation and repair with the multifarious voices that it convenes. By turns scholarly and lyrical, contemplative and bracing, this volume invites readers into a tender community of thought and feeling, helping us to make sense of the year we have just experienced in Jewish terms. Appealing to theology, history, and literary reflection, these essays locate our plague year in the long Jewish arcs of grief and devastation, as well as consolation and hope."" -Dr. Miriam Udel, editor and translator, Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature; associate professor of Yiddish, Emory University ""A dazzling array of scholars, rabbis, and writers explores diverse facets of the theological vertigo that comes from confrontation with the fragility of life. The result is an engaging volume full of learning and also of wisdom, a book that helps us both to think about precarity and pandemic, and also to live in the midst of it."" -Dr. David Nirenberg, dean of the Divinity School, University of Chicago, author, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition"

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available