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Full Description
Why should we be excluded from the history and literature of Judaism because the world of our fathers and mothers became a secularized one, Geoffrey Hartman asks, or because religious literacy, whatever our faith or community affiliation, has gone into relative decline? And why, he asks, do those who have no trouble finding pleasure and intellectual profit in the Greek and Roman classics or in the literary and artistic productions of two millennia of Western Christianity not easily find equal resonance and reward in the major texts in the Jewish tradition? For if Christianity and the classical inheritance stand as two pillars of Western civilization, surely the third pillar is the Jewish tradition.
In The Third Pillar Hartman, one of the most influential scholars and teachers of English and comparative literature of recent decades, has brought together some of the most important and eloquent essays he has written since the 1980s on the major texts of the Jewish tradition. In three groupings, on Bible, Midrash, and education, Hartman clarifies the relevance of contemporary literary criticism to canonical texts in the tradition, while demonstrating what has been-and what still remains to be-learned from the Midrash to enrich the interpretation of commentary and art, sacred or secular. "The map of the discipline [of Jewish studies] is still being drawn," Hartman writes. "Barely known areas tempt the explorer, and major reinterpretations remain possible. This third pillar of our civilization . . . is only now being fully excavated: we have discovered something but not everything about its structure and upholding function."
Contents
Preface
PART I. BIBLE
Chapter 1. The Struggle for the Text
Chapter 2. The Blind Side of the Akedah
Chapter 3. Numbers: Realism and Magic
Chapter 4. Meaning and Music
Chapter 5. The Poetics of Prophecy
PART II. MIDRASH
Chapter 6. Midrash as Law and Literature
Chapter 7. Jewish Tradition as/and the Other
Chapter 8. Angels in the Academy: The Drama of Commentary
Chapter 9. Text, Spirit, and the Bat Kol
PART III. EDUCATION
Chapter 10. Who Is an Educated Jew?
Chapter 11. Religious Literacy
Chapter 12. On the Jewish Imagination
Chapter 13. The Artist between Sacred and Profane
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
