The leaves of this book are gleaned from the garden of Torah study, tended with loving care by the members of the Egalitarian Minyan of Rogers Park, in Chicago, Illinois. Come in, and you will find an anthology of divrei Torah delivered by various members of the Minyan over the past several years. The members come to the Torah from a wide variety of backgrounds, and their divrei Torah yield a broad range of insights, some scholarly, some strikingly original, some challenging, but all heartfelt. To read this book is to witness once again how our ancient Torah is eternally new as each member wrestles with its profound and sometimes difficult message.
(Proceeds from the sale of this book will go to the tzedaka fund of the Egalitarian Minyan.)
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By David Richter
Oct 15, 2009
"Excellent Collection of Divrei Torah" The eighty-odd essays in Leaves from the Garden contain a rich mixture of careful scholarship and mystic vision, wisdom and wit, personal stories and narratives from the Tanach, the Talmud, and the Midrash. As with assortments of chocolates, some will be more to one's taste than others. The three pieces by Lise Weisberger combined scholarly insight with writing of unusual grace and charm, and one wished for more of them. Al Hobscheid's pieces on Temple architecture and on "milk and honey" are modest in their scholarship but consistently entertaining with their lateral thinking. Joan Katz's appeal is to music and to the mystical. Northwestern professor Ben Sommer's learned discussion of aggadic midrash is one of the few that made for difficult reading, because it seems to be an outline for a longer essay, and it requires one to fill in the gaps of an elaborate and complex argument. Richard Tupper appears most frequently, but... More > by no means too frequently: he occasionally does narrative criticism in the mode of Robert Alter and structural analysis in the mode of Jan Fokkelman, but his specialty is Milgromesque analysis of sacrifice and other aspects of Jewish law, which he explains with dash and dry wit, distilling the essence of contemporary scholarship on these issues. Tupper is not merely Milgrom lite, though: His dvar Torah on the homophobic verses in Leviticus 18 and 20, and how we might interpret them in the light of what we know today about the nature of sexual orientation, is scholarly, enlightened and sound. This is a collection that one can dip into over a year or leaf through in search of interesting ideas. More than anything, it made me feel what an amazingly stimulating congregation the lay-led Egalitarian Minyan of Rogers Park must be--one that I "joined" in reading this book.< Less
