Kesher Talk

This week's Pintele Yid recommendation - For our gentile friends and Jews who want to rediscover their heritage - recommending quintessentially Jewish cultural works (books, TV specials, CDs, Torah teachers, poets, websites, and more) which transport you inside a Jewish skin and show you the world through Jewish eyes.

(Last week's recommendation and introduction to the series here.)

These are the Words, Arthur Green.
Green is a noted scholar of Hassidic mysticism, especially the beloved Nachman of Bratslav and the Sfas Emes (about whom I wrote a bit last week).

In These are the Words Green provides a succinct guide to the Jewish worldview by identifying 149 essential Jewish concepts, expressed in particular Hebrew words that do not have exact equivalents in English. He devotes a page to each, beginning with the Hebrew designation for God, which is a verb: YHVH (which Bible scholars turn into "Jehovah"). This is a book to keep by the bedside and dip into.

I've heard Green lecture a few times. He's extremely thoughtful - he speaks deliberately and he'll stop talking for several minutes at a time and sit with his eyes closed, finding exactly what he wants to say, without any self-consciousness. You don't feel any impatience waiting, either. He can describe mystical experience so it is absolutely lucid, and that's a skill.

Week 3.
Week 4.
Week 5.
Week 6.
Week 7.
Week 8.

posted by Judith @ 7/07/2003 09:20:47 AM