The Sacred and the Mundane Can Meet
Elster, Shulamith Reich
The Sacred and the Mundane Can Meet Finding Our Way Jewish Texts and the Lives We Lead Today Barry W.Holtz Schocken, 1990.257 pp., $22.95 Reviewed by Shulamith Reich Elster Sacred texts can...
...Indeed, for people today all three types of prayer [petition, thanksgiving and in praise of the Almighty] are problematic...
...Finding Our Way is for the thoughtful Jew, one who believes that traditional values can inform contemporary life...
...The book's chapters are organized to reflect issues serious Jews must consider...
...In Finding Our Way Holtz carefully selects classical and contemporary texts: Talmud, Midrash, Mishneh Torah and contemporary work by Joseph Schwab, Peter Abbs, Abraham Joshua Heschel and others...
...The ability to pray involves more than understanding the words, the intent of the prayer and the manner in which specific ones are to be recited...
...Prayer may be, Holtz suggests, "an opportunity for renewal" if we engage in mental editing, placing the emphasis on what we "ourselves value (or want to value) rather than on what we might expect from God...
...In the introduction, "From Life to Text, From Text to Life," Holtz quotes Martin Buber: "Through a nations' education the generations which are growing up are made conscious of the great spiritual values whose source is the origin of their people....These values are deliberately woven into the design of their lives...
...This is the premise of Barry Holtz's most recent contribution to moBem Jewish thought...
...Holtz admits that "knowing there are three different kinds of prayer in the liturgy does little to help us in our attempts at praying...
...In another example Holtz observes, "Giving tzedakah [charity] is as complicated as receiving it...
...Shulanrith Reich Elster has been appointed Chief Educational Officer of the newly established Council for Initiatives in Jewish Education...
...They—we—need direction...
...Citing Mishnah, Berachot 9:3, Holtz points out that the rabbis were also troubled by the difficulties of prayer, by matters of kavanah (appropriate concentration) and kevah (fixed routine in prayer...
...Most Jews today are unschooled— even as they acknowledge the emotional and intellectual rewards of study...
...Finding Our Way is best compared to a seminar with a methodical teacher who shares his personal search while urging students to seek their own connections between text and contemporary life...
...Rabbi Chanina quotes Rabbi Eleazar to make the point that there may well be undeserving people...
...Anticipating serious students' further questions and beginning with his own, Dr...
...Citing a selection from the Talmud in which Rabbi Chanina and his wife discuss the possibility that the beneficiary of their weekly four zuz may be a "welfare cheat," our teacher helps us think about how to behave when approached for a handout...
...Holtz, codirector of the Jewish Theological Seminary's Melton Center for Research in Jewish Education, explores how this ancient body of literature can nurture and sustain us today...
...In an earlier guide, Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (Jewish Publication Society, 1984), Holtz and a group of distinguished young scholars taught us how to approach Judaism's classical texts—Bible, Talmud, Midrash and siddur—and the works of the medieval commentators and philosophers and the Chasidic masters...
...their role is to enable us to "ignore some of the appeals that we get on the grounds that they may be phony...
...The Sacred and the Mundane Can Meet Finding Our Way Jewish Texts and the Lives We Lead Today Barry W.Holtz Schocken, 1990.257 pp., $22.95 Reviewed by Shulamith Reich Elster Sacred texts can help us to "reimagine who we are as human beings...
Vol. 16 • August 1991 • No. 4
